Well, the sad face is mostly for the amount of work outstanding. It'll be great when it's done. Just one of those 'how much to do...' faces MDF is better at the edges, but it's made from layers. When you're putting screws in, you need to go across the layers, and not with them. Going in the same direction as the layers will cause it to split: I used small screws in this test piece. Larger screws would probably have split it right the way across.
It holds a finish pretty well. On my cab, I'm planning on priming, sanding, priming, sanding, painting, sanding, painting. Quite a bit of work, but should give a good finish. The on top of that lot, the control panel will get some coats of clear varnish to help protect it. I don't know how well the paint will hold up once it gets several hot and sweaty hands laying on top of it The varnish should help stop any flaking. Alternatively a couple of coats of gloss paint might work just as well...
Are you going to keep using that monitor? You could go on Ebay and get one of those projector hook-ups and get a cheap overhead and there you have a nice big screen. I dunno if you could integrate it into the whole cabinet though.
Well, I picked up my 3/4" MDF today cheap stuff that. I'm happy with it because it looks quite sturdy! It is heavy though...but thats no worry either I guess...I'm thinking about varnishing the sides and what-not but covering the control panel with marble formica or something of the sort...should protect from the sweat from hands quite well and will also look quite sexeh I think...its either that or a layer of plexi so I can put labels underneath the plexi...ever thought of that?
Yeah, I did think of that, but 3/4" MDF is a tad thick by the time you get plexi on top as well. You'd also have to route out a fair bit of extra material from the bottom of the MDF in order to fit the joysticks. I'd rather keep the strength of the MDF. If I was using 1/2" MDF, I'd have done it, but I just wanted one size of MDF to keep things simple Plexi does look nice though, and adding an overlay to the controls really does enhance the appearance. And printing high quality overlays isn't cheap either We have a large A0 plotter in house, and it was still going to be fairly pricey.
