When I first saw the Umbrella Arcade's wall-mounted arcade machine, I had to have it.
I mean, there's this 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 US dollars, 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 in 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 windset for a month.
What? You heard me? Okay, but the weird handshake. Deal.
Like this deal we made with our sponsor.
I want to take on Umbrella's high-end model. They're using a Nook-style 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 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. Well, 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 electronic, 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.
I'm thinking we'll have to use, they're a whole 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 break, 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 two foot by four foot, and that's actually going to impact our design choices a little bit.
Let me explain. Two feet is going to be too narrow for two players to stand at,
but the four foot width of our metal is definitely too wide.
I think we're going to hit somewhere around 30 inches, 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 inches,
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. The monitor will be up here.
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 controls or 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,
because I can fold it up later on with a router bit and get perfectly smooth.
What are you doing? Linus said we could use the bandsaw. Oh yeah.
Why am I doing this? The bandsaw does a lot of the same job as the jigsaw,
just a lot more efficiently, and every boomer has a bandsaw anyway.
Okay, I think you can see 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've got a flush trim bit in our router here, and this will basically ride along this bearing
on this hunk of plywood to attach to this straight edge,
and it'll make this edge perfectly smooth.
Here we have our two sides. We'll have a little bit more cleanup later on,
but don't worry about that right now. 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 clean everything up at the end. I'm just marking about a half 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 break,
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 inches 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 we'll bend over,
and they'll screw into our wood panels.
We're just kind of figuring out exactly where to lay them out, and then we'll 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 the piece.
A 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 inches across, so it'll be the same as our panels when we're done with them,
and 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 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. 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 three quarters of the way done, I would say,
for the mounting. So, I mean, we're going to cross those off.
Just going to have to cross something off. Tomorrow, we've 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,
and 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 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 countersink 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 tap. I'm going to attach it onto the living frame.
I'm going to use this one by six 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.
Do something like that. I got these templates from a site called slagcoin.com.
We've got a bunch of different options. This is kind of a generic version
of a typical Japanese arcade machine, and I find this to be pretty comfortable for my own use,
so that's what we're going to go with. So now I'm just going to cut some holes.
First things first, 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 our kitchen.
What we do 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.
A little tough to get to our screws from the top, so we flip this up on its side,
and it's still 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 to the bottom,
and the drawer will figure out to fit in the middle. With our last piece or else,
even this little scrap, maybe we'll see a 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 Hertz, 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 monitors fit our hole.
Our monitor fits quite nicely in here.
Up you go there.
Up there, and then flip it 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. The PC, we actually had two options delivered earlier today,
but 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 San Juan 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 slides you 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 San Juan joysticks as well.
They 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 tops, they'll be nice and smooth.
But for now, these will work fine. Each of our joystick kits pairs with one of these little control ports.
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 a arcade machine. Let's see if it works.
Yeah, that happened. We're using our magnetic cable management essential solution,
lttstore.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 David Pankratz. He's our new technical production assistant, something like that.
Yeah, that's the one. Perfect. What do you got for us? I've got two options here.
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 four terabyte drive in here right now,
which is a bit overkill. You could drop that down to a two terabyte and save about a hundred 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 Minisforum UM970 Pro.
This one has a two terabyte 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.
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.
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 Pancrats a little early. We needed his help to get everything running again here, but now we're looking great.
Obviously, we need some spit and polish to get on the machine, but 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.
I think so. 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 magnets. They're just magnets.
Wow. Everything magnet. What? I don't get it.
It's a reference. Except for the parts that are computer.
Um, is that blood? No, that's paint.
Cool. Okay. Here's your coins. First player, second player.
Ooh. Your starts. Are those just the monitors built in speakers?
No, those speakers in the back of the logitech.
I actually kind of like how they sound. They're an appropriate level of shit.
Yeah. Yeah. Cause there's no grills. So they've got kind of like a boomy 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, Oh, this is a nice interface.
This is just a different skin on the same front end though, right? It's still, it's still about a serve,
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?
30 bucks a US an hour. 30 US dollars an hour.
I think you were still able to beat them by just over a thousand US dollars.
All right. I think you guys are probably around 3300 to 3400 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.
A couple of weekends, basically. Did that include all of the software configuration?
Yes. Because they've got more games on theirs than we have.
I have a full name to it on there, sir. Our total was $24.44 and $0.59.
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 2500 US dollars or this for 4400 US dollars?
Well, go. Leave a comment. And while you're down there,
be sure to check out our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go check out the ShortCircuit 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.