As most people already know about me, I love making things with wood. I am a software engineer by profession and I love tinkering with hardware and wood as a hobby. As fun as it is to do my day to day job and spend time on my hobbies, to me it’s a whole lot more appealing whenever I get to combine hobbies and profession. So a few weeks ago, I had picked up a Raspberry Pi 4 for a smart home hub I wanted to build. One thing led to another and I ended up installing RetroPie in that Pi instead. From that point on, it was open season for ideas to flow through my head and, lo and behold, I ended up ordering a set of arcade game controllers and boards on Amazon.

Approximately 4 weeks later, I have a cool wooden case where I can play almost any retro game I want.

The Plan

While this blog post is NOT a tutorial on how to build this console, I think there’s still value in mentioning how I approached this build so someone else can take ideas and may choose to build on that idea themselves.

After receiving the controllers and making a poor man’s version of a proof of concept, I took out my notebook and sketched up a design based on small box I had made late last year. The original design of that box was inspired by Matt Kenney who is quite well known in the woodworking community.

There are many types of wood I could choose from to do this, but in the end, I went with Cherry sides and Walnut top and bottom because I liked how it looked and these species of hardwood are slightly lighter than something like Maple or White Oak – either of which also would’ve looked great to be honest. I didn’t want the box to show any of the end grains, which ruled out finger joints or dovetails or even butt joints. I went with something that’s relatively straight forward – mitered four sides and cut grooves to allow for the bottom and top boards to fit snugly together.

As far as where the circuitries go, I had to make a judgment call on whether to use the chamber at the bottom or the lid. In the end, given how I needed to have space for the joy stick handles, I decided to put the Raspberry Pi, LCD Panel Controller Board, Voltage regulator and the speakers on a special housing in the lid.

Internals

This gaming console is based on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 2GB RAM. I used a RetroPie image and followed instructions from here. For the LCD Panel, I used an old Lenovo monitor I had laying around in the house. Here’s the full list of items I used to make this. Most of these links are Amazon Affiliate links, so if you use these links to purchase any of the italicized items listed below, I will get a tiny percentage of that sale without any cost to you 🙂

• Cherry boards (dimensioned to about 1/2 inch thickness)
• Walnut Boards (dimensioned to about 1/2 inch thickness)
• Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB
• Arcade Console Controllers
• Crazy Horse Leather
• Brass Knurled Thumb Screws
• Brass Hinges
• Brass Lid Stays
• DIY Speaker/Volume Kit
• 1/2″ PET Expandable Braided Cable Sleeving
• 32GB Micro SD Memory Card
• Buck Voltage Converter
• Heat Sinks for Raspberry Pi
• Small Rubber Round Feet
• Lenovo LI2264d Monitor

ROMS

For downloading ROMs of desire, I shamelessly followed detailed instructions provided here. Nothing much to add here besides a word of advice. The only MAME game I was able to successfully play was Cadillacs and Dragons. Most MAME games have interdependencies on each other, so unless you acquire the full set of MAME games, chances are, most of them will not work.

Final Product

I started out with this project a few weeks back just before Virginia’s stay-at-home order went into effect. I had bought walnut and cherry wood from a local lumber store and had them mill the lumber for me in s3s (Surfaced 3 sides). I have a small wood shop in my basement and do not have a planer or a jointer, so being able to do this at the lumber store was super helpful for me. They also don’t charge me an arm and a leg to do so which is always a plus! After bringing these home, I laid out a rough plan with the available amount of wood I’d purchased. With the lumber cut to appropriate sizes, I knew I wanted to use dovetails joints so I got down to making the joints as the first step.

Just before I got started on the first step, however, I made sure to sharpen my tools razor sharp as I always do, so that I’m not slowed down in the middle of the process or worse yet, damage the wood. I have a set of diamond sharpening stones that I picked up after being sold on them by no other than Paul Sellers and I know I’m never going back to using whetstones again. These work really well and with the addition of leather strops with abrasive compounds, my chisels and planes come out razor sharp every time.

For cutting the dovetail joints, I pulled out my Katz-Moses Dovetail Jig, my marking knife, pencil, saw and my chisels. For this process I marked out the tail end of the boards with the thickness of the perpendicular board (the back of the side table) and clearly marked out the tails and the remaining portions of what was going to be waste material. I have both Japanese saws and European style saws and while I usually prefer the Japanese pull saws, I actually prefer the European style Veritas saw I have and find that best suited for the job with the dovetail jig. Once the cuts were done, I pulled out my chisels and carved away all the waste materials. By the end of the process, I had near perfect aligned dovetail joints that I was really happy with.

After doing the dovetail joints, it was time to take on the legs. I knew I wanted to set the back legs at an angle of 10 degrees while having all the legs tapered from top to bottom. To do this, I had to keep track of the angle at which I was tapering the legs and the angle of the slant of the rear legs. I created the tapered legs with a table saw crosscut sled that I’d made earlier that guarantees accurate cuts and provides supports for holding my work pieces in place while cutting.

Once the legs were done, it was time to do the bevel cuts. I had to do this in the right order. First, I took the top part of the table and cut a ‘increasing’ bevel from back to front. Then I glued the back and the bottom of the top and cut bevels using table saw all the way through from back to front. This allowed me to make precise cuts. Once this was done, I cut mortises for the rear legs and cut in chambers for the front legs. I wanted the bottom portion of the walnut top to be supported on the cherry legs but at the same time have part of the front legs be visible, just so it adds bit of a character to the top. All leg slots had to be cut by hand, and this is where the sharp chisels shined! I also took a moment to blunt out all the edges of the leg with a block plane. This was particularly satisfying to do with the block plane made crisp sound while thin shavings curled up in the open chamber of the plane.

Once that was done, it was time to put it all together to the point of no return and glue everything up. I clamped everything down and let it dry for more than a day. The next step was sanding – a LOT of sanding and then some. I started with 60 grit sandpaper to smooth out all the uneven joints and then worked my way up to 800 grits by following through 120, 240 400 grit sandpapers and took out any sharp edges along the way. Once done, I wiped everything done and put on a coat of Boiled Linseed Oil on it and that immediately made the wood darker and all the grains very nicely exaggerated.

It was now time take some photos of this and here they are 🙂 A lot of love and care went into making this and hopefully furniture pieces like this will last a lifetime.

For more of my woodwork, please follow @woodness_gracious 🙂