I've decided to cut the cabinet out of ¾" Pre-finished birch plywood, using the Joust plans on ClassicArcadeCabinets.com. The plans arn't perfect, but i hope to refine them a bit and resubmit them to the site to help others make better copies themselves.
We're using my buddy's shop, Cornel's World. Anyone who follows me or The Canadian Arcade on Youtube may recognize this place. http://www.CornelsWorld.com. Greg specializes in building custom Terrariums and a ton of wood working projects. He was also on the 7th Season of Dragon's Den with a successful pitch a few years back. Massive asset to the process for sure. I met Greg about 5 years ago when i was building my FLYNN's Arcade MAME cabinet and needed someone to CnC the side panels and Control panel top.
I couldn't get my Joust into the shop in time, so i decided to bring an old hacked up control panel and a Winslow speaker grill that i had laying around for reference. I've also decided to remove the lower coin door from the design. This is a home use cabinet. It will be painted Red/Black, and I had no needed for the added cost or time to add the lower cash box door. I'm having a hard enough time tracking down the lower marquee bracket for this build anyways.
We had a few screw-ups along the way, mainly in the settings of the tool path for the CnC, but we simply just tossed a new sheet down and kept going.
Here's a close up shot of the finish on the plywood. This will drastically speed up my finishing time when i go to paint the cabinet.
Assembly was pretty strait forward, First we made sure to arrange the parts as bet we could from the plans on the site. This was one of my big issues with the downloaded files, not all the parts were abled, so we had to use our best guess for which went where. Now, having an actual cab at home i could have just used that as reference, but at this point it wasn't worth heading across the city and back. Plus not everyone has that luxury of an original.
After we figured out what piece went were, we added some wood glue and a ton of bar clamps. As few other noticeable issues with the plans were the top panel and the power switch/vent back panel. The required to be beveled down on the table saw to fit the rear profile of the cabinet. I know this because of my actual cabinets, but thats not listed in the plans. Again, when i can, i'll submit a revision to the plans on CAC.
Thats it for now, More to come later on after i get the clamps off of it and assemble my paint booth at home.
Why be jealous? Just get Rick over at GRD to cut you one. 
