When I first saw the Umbrella Arcades wall-mounted arcade machine, I had to
have it. I mean, there's the sleek design. There's the fact that you've got
any retro game you could want at your fingertips. The fact it doesn't take up
any floor space. But the price, $4,400,
$1,800 for the shell. It's some bent sheet metal. Yeah. How is this thing so
expensive? I feel like anyone with some spare time and some tools could probably
make one themselves. I've got some tools and some spare time or paid time.
Okay, fine. But here's the deal. You
can't use any exotic tools. Basically, if you couldn't borrow it from your
boomer neighbor, you're not allowed to use it. And you have to include an
hourly wage in your cost because your time isn't free. Okay. But if I pull it
off, it gets to live on the line set for a month. What? You heard me. Okay. What
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I want to take on Umbrella's high-end model. They're using a Nookstyle
computer with a Ryzen 7. We can easily match or beat that. Construction-wise,
it's just a bunch of sheet metal with holes punched in and bent it in shape.
All we got to do is throw in a monitor, speakers, controls, and I guess figure
out how to hang it on the wall and we're good to go. I'd love to just do this whole thing out of wood in like a couple
hours and call it a day, but that's not really the point of the series. We're
trying to remake this thing we found as close as we can to the original style
and you know learn some new things as we go. You can't use any exotic tools
because I don't have a welder though. Joining all the metal together is not
going to be that easy. So I think we're still going to have to use some wood like here on the side panels and then
we'll screw the rest of the metal into that wood. The control panel electronics
we can just get online. I'll order them. They'll show up later. Actually mounting
them is going to be a little tricky because we can't use the laser cutter. You can't use I'm thinking we'll have to
use either a hole saw or maybe we've got a big enough step bit, something like
that. We'll see when we get to it. The thing we can't get around is we're going
to have to bend metal, but I've got just the thing for that. The rules say I can
buy one special tool as long as it's within reach of you guys following along
at home. This is a sheet metal brake, and you can get it at places like Harbor
Freight. It's not cheap by any means, but it's not expensive compared to our
$4,400 arcade machine. And once we're done with it, we can throw it on
marketplace and get some of our money back. Let's go check out the metal we're
actually going to be working with. This is 18 gauge steel. It's uh 2
ft x 4 ft. And that's actually going to impact our design choices a little bit.
Let me explain. 2 ft is going to be too narrow for two players to stand at, but
the 4ft width of our metal is definitely too wide. I think we're going to hit
somewhere around 30 in. And we'll do some cutting. I think our best bet is to
make our wooden sides and frame first and then we'll adjust the metal to fit
that. I'm going to recruit Justin to help for a little while here. He's better with the metal work than me,
too. We've cut our MDF down to a more manageable size. And now I'm going to
start drawing the silhouette down on the wood so we know where to cut. I'm doing
a little bit of designing on the go here because I don't want to have any lengths
that are greater than 24 in because of the size of our metal panels. This is a
bevel gauge. I'm using it to copy the angles from my drawing onto the wood.
This one's pretty ancient, but you can still get these in literally any
hardware shop for like 10, 20 bucks. I think you can see this starting to take
shape now. Uh the monitor will be up here. The controls are going to be here
with lots of room under here for wiring. I think under here I want to leave room
for a drawer so we can put in our keyboard and mouse and maybe a couple of
wireless PlayStation controllers, something like that. Draw a little line
down to the bottom here. It's not too long for our sheet metal. And we can
start
cutting. The two layers of MDF is a little bit much for this little jigsaw,
but I'd rather get both pieces cut the same way at the same time rather than
trying to make it even later.
I'm cutting a little bit outside the lines here cuz I can follow it up later on with a router bit and get it
perfectly smooth. What are you doing? L said we could use the bandsaw. Oh yeah.
Why am I doing this? A bandsaw does a lot of the same job as a jigsaw, just a
lot more efficiently. And every boomer has a band saw
anyway. Okay, I think you can see the the basic shape we're going for here.
All we need to do now is clean it up a little bit and then we can start working on the metal. We got a flush trim bit in
our router here. And this will basically ride along this bearing on this hunk of
plywood we've attached here as a straight edge. And it'll make this edge
perfectly smooth. Here we have our two sides. Uh we'll have to a little bit
more clean up later on, but don't worry about that right now. Uh the last thing
we'll end up doing is a slot right along the edge here. And that'll be for some
molding later on to heat everything up at the end. I'm just marking about a/ an
inch in from the edge. And that's where our metal is going to end up in the end.
We could cut our metal with these tin snips, but 18 gauge is a little bit
thick for that. And while we were picking up our sheet metal brake, we
happened to see these air nippers on sale for about 30 bucks Canadian. So,
we're going to go with that. It's going to be way easier. Our goal is to have 30
in wide, but we're going to add on an inch on either side of that to have
little tabs on each of the I guess we'll call them side edges of our metal. We're
going to have, I think, three tabs that will bend over and they'll screw into
our wood panels. Um, we're just kind of
figuring out exactly where to lay them out. And then we'll, uh, get cutting.
Again, I don't remember what this is called, but we're going to use this to
bend our tabs. So, we're basically going to just measure in a couple inches from
the end, put our clamp in place, and then mark on either side of
it.
Right now, this is still pretty floppy. We're going to fold over an edge on each
side, and that's going to give us a lot more
rigidity there.
So, our next one. I think we can do this whole piece as one, right? Yeah. Let's
just do a little
piece. Little more if it's possible. I don't know if it
is. Yeah, that's good. This is T- molding. It'll go around all the edges
here once we're done. I'm just making sure I've got this relatively lined up.
Oh, that's
perfect. I'm just assembling the side panels with some MDF bracing. This is
also 30 in across, so it'll be the same as our panels when we're done with them.
And uh this will give us a little bit more rigidity in the back without having to do a bunch more metal.
Sorry. He's not
sorry. I've got the panel for the monitor here. Let's uh see if it
fits. Good work, Justin. We're at the end of day one, so let's kind of check
in where we are here. Our MDF sides, those are good. Happy with that. Uh
metal panels, the one for the monitor is mostly here. We got to cut a hole in it,
but that's easy enough. The control panel, Justin's got that about 3/4 of
the way done, I would say, for the the mounting. So, I mean, we're going to
cross those off just because I have to cross something off. Uh, tomorrow we got
to build a drawer to go underneath the control panel. That's for our keyboard
and mouse and everything. And then we'll deal with a plate underneath that. We'll
check in with Pancrats for a PC, figure out all our electronics, and eventually
we'll show this thing to Linus. It's day two, and uh while we're waiting for
Justin to get here, we're just going to put some screws into the wood frame to
beef it up a little bit. It's important to pre-drill the holes so we don't split
the wood. And we're also using a bit of a counter synink here. So the screws will end up below the surface of the
wood. That way we can maybe put on some fill afterwards to make it nice and
smooth. Justin's using this map gas torch. You'll find this in the plumbing
section of any Home Depot. He's heating up the metal and bending over our tab so
we can attach it onto the wooden frame. I'm going to use this 1x6 to build a
French cleat mounting system.
How this works is we stick this up against the wall and then the arcade
machine will just hang right off of it. And because we cut it at the same time, it's a perfect
alignment. So, something like that. I got these templates from a site called
slagcoin.com. We got a bunch of different options. This is kind of a
generic version of a typical Japanese arcade machine. And I found this to be
pretty comfortable for my own use. So, that's what we're going to go with. So, now I just got to cut some holes.
First things first, uh we're going to drill some pilot holes. So, that way we can use our step drill bit here, which
will allow us to drill the holes for this.
What we do, yeah, is just hold it in place where we want it. We're going to
temporarily install our first couple of panels here. We think that's going to make it a little easier to drill our
control panel out. It's a little tough to get to our screws from the top. So,
we flip this up on its side. And it's still, you know, a little awkward as you
can see here. A little snug, but with an extension and a bit of patience, it's
going in.
Okay. Okay. So, this I'm thinking is the
kick plate. So, the bottom. Yeah. And the drawer we'll figure out to fit in
the middle with our last piece. Or else even the sunk of scrap maybe. We'll see.
Little more under 90, but like probably
75. We grabbed this old ASUS ProArt monitor from Logistics. It's not in
great shape, but it'll do 1440 at 60 Hz, which is really all we need to do. And I
can find it for about 100 bucks on eBay, which is a good bonus. I'm thinking we
put in a shelf to hold the monitor. Something like that. And then we can
just use the two ball joints in the monitor arm to position the monitor to
fit our
hole. Our monitor fits quite nicely in
here.
There. And then flip her up onto the floor again. We're doing good. Now what?
Drawer. Yeah. This piece here will be our front
panel for the drawer. These are the sides and this is the back. Meaning that
we need to get rid of this big chunk here,
here, this hole by
here. So, in terms of physical
construction, probably 90% of the way there. We have to do the electronics.
That's going to be just a bunch of wiring, but it's pretty much Lego. Uh
the PC, we actually had two options delivered earlier today. We haven't had
a chance to look at them yet. Turn everything on, see if we can play some games and show it to Linus and, you
know, maybe paint it and make it look a little bit less ugly. We bought two
packs of these Sana 30 mil buttons. They're the same ones that are being
used by the Umbrella Arcades machine.
You may have noticed this is upside down right now, but there's a good reason for
that is we're about to drill out for the joysticks. Before we get to that, I just
want to show you the drawer slots we put in here on either side. And our metal
drawer is just going to ride along those. And inside there, we can put our
PC and our keyboard and extra controllers, all that kind of fun stuff.
So, it's easy to access. Don't have to pull off any panels or anything to do
any changes. These are sand joysticks as well that came along with our buttons as
a set. And we just need four bolts to
hold them into our control panel. We're still waiting for the
proper bolts to arrive. Those will have no cut in the top so they be nice and
smooth. But for now, these will work fine. Each of our joystick kits pairs
with one of these little control boards. Basically, it's just a little USB
controller. We plug our wire into one
end and the other end goes to each one of the buttons. I think it looks like an
arcade machine. Let's see if it
works. Yeah, that happened. We're using our magnetic cable management essential
solution, ltdstore.com, to connect our control
boards right onto our metal housing. Conveniently
magnetic. Obviously, we're going to need a computer to run this thing. So, we had
David give us a couple of options. Oh, not that David. This is uh David
Pancrret. He's our new uh technical production assistant. Something like
that. Yeah, that's the one. Perfect. What do you got for us? Uh I've got two
options here. Okay. Uh we've got the Raspberry Pi 5 and this has a hat on it
so you can stick an NVMe drive in there. Beautiful. We've got a 4 TB drive in
here right now, which is a bit overkill. You could drop that down to a two TB and
save about a h 100red bucks. But this package as it is is about
$375. That's not too bad. Okay, if you want a little bit more power, we've got
the Minis Forum UM970 Pro. All right.
Uh, this one has a two TB drive in it right now and 16 gigs of RAM. And this
package would end up costing you about 525. Okay, that's not too bad either,
actually. I'm kind of surprised. Uh, how much time would it take you to set them
up? Honestly, it was a lot more
difficult downloading the image off of the site in terms of time. Uh once
you've got the image off the site, it was as easy as using Etcher to image the
drives over and then you were pretty much good to go. Perfect. Thank you very
much for your help. Yeah, not a problem. All right. I'm only going to pay for one
of these. By the way, I guess we kicked out Pancrrets a little early. We needed
his help to uh get everything running again here. But now we're looking great.
Obviously, we need some spit and polish get on the machine, but uh I think we're
going to do that as a bit of a montage for you guys. And next time you see this, Linus will be evaluating
it. All
right, here's what we did.
Damn. You like it?
Way more than I expected to.
Thanks. Don't take that the wrong way. Don't take that the wrong way. We used
magnetic cable management for our handles.
Are they attached or are they just No, they're just magnet. They're just Wow.
Everything magnet. What? I don't get it.
It's a reference. Two. Except for the parts that are computer.
Dear God. Um, is that blood? No, that's paint.
Cool. Well, okay. Here's your coins. First player, second player. Your
starts. Are those just the monitors builtin
speakers? No, there's speakers in the back of the Logitech.
I actually kind of like how they sound. They're an appropriate level of
Yeah. Yeah, cuz there's no grills, so they've got kind of like a boommy crappy
sound to them, but it's very arcadey. Well, this
is great for just quickly navigating. So, uh, how do we go to the Ooh, this is
a nice interface. This is just a different skin on the same front end,
though, right? It's still It's still better, but it's like their default interface.
Oh, balls. Look, it's hard. It is designed
to steal my quarters. I gotta say in terms of the actual user experience now
that it is complete because
obviously it was a little bit more work to
build. This does not feel meaningfully that different. Do I get to guess what
the budget was? What did you guys pay yourselves per hour? Uh 30 bucks US an
hour. $30 an hour. I think you were
still able to beat them by just over $1,000.
All right. I think you guys are probably around 3,300 to 3,400 US. Oh, you're way
over. Really? How long did this take to build? This took 22 29 hours really of
actual labor. That's pretty good. Couple of weekends basically. Did that include
all of the software configuration because they've got more games on theirs
than we have? I have a full name set on there, sir. Our total was $24.44 and 59.
So, we beat it by two grand pretty much.
Wow. I see that two different ways. Okay. I see that as wow, we could build
something that is functionally very similar for half the price and have the
fun of learning how to do it for ourselves while paying ourselves $30 an
hour to do it. But I also see it as okay, so basically we're paying them two
grand to figure everything out for us pretty much and for whatever level of
support they're going to give you. So, the only question that remains then is
buy or DIY. And you're the only ones who
can answer this for us. Which would you rather have? This for
$2,500 or this for
$4,400? Well, go leave a comment. And
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features. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go check out the short
circuit video that we did on the Umbrella Arcade? We found some really
good things about it and we found some not so good things for what they're
charging. They could have included better controllers like Jordan did in
his build.