The Build

Now for the physical process of putting everything together. Before starting this project, I had zero (absolutely zero) woodworking experience and almost zero electrical/electronics experience, so I had very much considered whether building a whole cabinet from scratch was a good idea. An early option was to design the cabinet then hand over the designs to a carpenter to build, but I dismissed this simply because in this part of the world any carpenter I could find would not be a native English speaker, the build is quite complex and my 12 year's of experience living here has taught me that trying to explain even easy concepts can often be almost impossible, let alone a unusual cabinet design that the carpenter would never have built before. So I decided, with reassurance from friendly folk at Reddit and on various Facebook groups (VP Nation, Virtual Pinball Addicts, Virtual Pinball and VPin Cab Builders in particular), to build it myself.

Once I had the cutting plan ready, I headed to a local Makerspace (20 minutes down the road in Al Zeina) and got myself a month's membership. I had already done the necessary safety/induction trainings so got to work on the cutting.

Tools

The major woodworking tools would be available to me at the Makerspace, but I did need to buy some specific things that they didn't have, including:

Various hole saws:

145mm for the 6" subwoofer
120mm for fans
95mm for the backbox 4" speakers

Various Forstner bits:

1 1/8" bit for the flipper buttons (imported from US because it's an imperial size)
19mm bit for the top part of the plunger cutout
18mm dado bit

I also used 35mm and 25mm Forstner bits for the front panel button holes and the backbox floor bolt holes; these were provided by the Makerspace
Various brad point bits:

12mm for backbox holts
13mm for leg bolt holes in wooden braces

Bits and bobs:

Safety goggles
Corner clamps to keep the cabinet together whilst it was being glued
A strap clamp to keep the leg bolt jig in place whilst I drilled the leg bolt holes
A set of tapping tools to allow me to drill holes for the motherboard standouts on the dedicated plywood tray I created for it

Screws: I bought an absolute mountain of screws of different types and sizes because almost everything needed bespoke sizes, including:

The fans, which needed extra long

The Cabinet

The cabinet is a 3/4 scaled-down version of a standard Williams pinball cabinet. The smaller size means that all the wood parts easily fit into a standard sized piece of plywood (1.2m by 2.4m), including the cabinet floor which I think, for a full-size cab, is too large to be cut out of a single sheet. I used a sheet of maple plywood sourced for me by the Makerspace team. As it turns out (see later) I screwed up the side panel cutting and unfortunately didn't have enough spare to cut new ones, so I had to buy another half piece (1.2 x 1.2m) just for them.

Cutting

The workshop routine was basically cut->drill holes->cut dados and rabbets.

Cutting was generally OK, though stressful as one wrong measurement or mis-cut can result in a wasted piece of wood (and wasted time). The only major mess that I made was a result of mis-reading a measurement on my cutting plan: in Sketchup, I added measurements to all the key edges, then copied screenshots into Word and added instructions. For my side panels, the length of one edge was 442mm, but the label was superimposed on the edge of the diagram and in the instructions, I mis-read it as 412mm.

The annoying this is that I even built in a safeguard "sense-check" to use whilst I was measuring things to make sure I hadn't made an error. Whilst I was measuring the plywood for the side panels, I tried the safeguard and got the wrong answer. But instead of stopping and working out what I had done wrong, I assumed that the error was in the safeguard itself, ignored it and cut the side panels with a 412mm edge rather than a 442mm edge. Moral of the story: if you're going to put safeguards in your cutting plan, pay attention to them!

Cutting the various holes was mostly pretty easy, using the drill press in the Makerspace. With the large hole saws I had to do things carefully to avoid setting the plywood on fire due to the significant friction and lots of sawdust. I also panicked when I vacuumed up all the sawdust and then worried that I'd accidentally vacuumed up some embers that were going to set the vacuum on fire.

For the rabbets and dado, my original plan was to use a table router and rabbet bits, but the Makerspace team suggested I try using the table saw instead. As I have basically no idea what I'm doing in woodwork, I agreed. In retrospect, I think I would have got a better result if I had used the router table. The table saw did allow me to cut nice straight edges, but the process was slow and painful in terms of cutting a 2.5mm slice (the kerf of the saw), then realigning the saw fences, then cutting another slice etc. It was also tricky when it came to cutting rabbets on the side panels which are not rectangular - here the problem was that the top edge of the side panels has a 10 degree slope. This top side needed to be placed against the cross-cut fence for certain rabbets. But because of the slope, this meant that the rabbet would not be parallel to the front edge of the panel. I struggled over this for ages before realising that I could use one side panel as a jig for the other.

By far the most sketchy woodworking thing was cutting the triangular wedges for the leg brackets. The Pinscape guide itself acknowledges the safety issues with this cut. My lack of experience combined with a table saw that would only tilt towards the rip-fence rather than away, meant that cutting these wedges felt pretty terrifying. Also, I didn't have any suitable wood and only managed to scavenge one piece of scrap that was the right size. So I ended up with one decent triangular wedge. Once cut, I realised it was too big so thought I could sand it down using the giant sander in the workshop. I must have been tired when I made this decision, because there was no way that I'd be able to grip the small wedge against the massive friction of the sander. So what happened instead is it ripped the wedge out of my fingers and sanded off the end of my index finger. Which hurt quite a lot. Mentally and physically scarred by this experience, I gave up on cutting any more wedges and instead bought some triangular edge moulding from Ace Hardware which I cut down to size. This solution is much less physically robust, but as I'm building a smaller-sized cabinet and don't expect to be doing any massive slam tilts, I hope I'll be OK.

As a complete beginner, it took me about 5 full days in the workshop to do all this. I think if I had to do it again, I could probably halve that time now that I have some experience.

Assembly

With all the pieces cut, routed and drilled, I brought everything home to assemble. I didn't want to do this inside because there'd still be lots of drilling, sanding and painting so I put everything on our patio. The problem with this plan is that Abu Dhabi in August is around 40 degrees in the day and 33 degrees at night. Such temperatures don't really lend themselves to pleasant outdoor work, even in the shade in the evenings.

A few rabbet joints had to be tweaked with a chisel to try to bring things flush, but mostly everything fit together. The hardest bit (which I think everyone who has built a cabinet, beginner or pro, would agree with) is drilling the leg bolt holes. These have to be drilled at a 45 degree angle into the corners of the cabinet. To do that, you really need a drilling jig. I actually built one at the Makerspace specifically for this purpose, but for some reason lost faith in it after using it on the front leg bolts and bought a "professional" jig from Amazon for the rear. Turns out the holes I cut for the front were significantly better aligned than those I cut for the rear, because my jig had carefully measured holes for the bolts, ensuring that they were exactly the right distance apart. Whereas the Amazon jig only had one hole, so I had to move it up and down, and obviously did this poorly so my rear bolt holes were not exactly the right distance apart, making fitting the leg bolts quite tedious, particularly in the heat.

I deviated from the Pinscape guide on the rear leg bolt holes: I kept them at the same height as the front whereas the guide has them lower down, making the rear of the cabinet higher than the front and having the whole thing tilt forward. If I had kept the tilt, then I felt the backbox would be leaning forwards too much, and the top of the backbox would obscure line of sight to the top of the backbox monitor for any reasonably tall adult.

Painting

I ultimately intend to decorate the cabinet with custom vinyl decals (so will need to add Adobe Illustrator to my newly-acquired skills) but in the meantime thought the best option would be to paint the cabinet with a simple semi-gloss black. Online guides go into detail about how to paint plywood, with many steps designed to remove any wood grain from the paint finish. In my case, I quite like the wood grain and, quite frankly, was getting fed up of losing half my body-weight in sweat every night, so wanted to get things finished as soon as possible and brought indoors. So whilst I took care to sand down the panels to a 320 grit finish, I didn't bother with all the extra wood grain filler steps before I started spray painting.