After a couple weeks of back-and-forth on the overall parameters of the design for the cabinet, Haruman got me a couple first-pass renderings of the cabinet. Colors and stuff don’t match what I’m intending to do, but the overall size and layout is exactly what I was hoping for!

The control panels are quite a bit bigger than a “normal” Midway-style cocktail cabinet, which the cabinet is modeled on. Obviously normal cabinets don’t have the panel on the front side, but the end panels are several inches deeper, and fifty percent wider than a normal cabinet. They’re also taller, which reduces leg room a bit, but the cabinet is also likely going to be on aluminum legs that match the rest of the furniture in the home theater, which will raise it up four inches.

As mentioned before, the cabinet will be furniture-grade half-inch Baltic birch plywood, likely stained to match the home theater furniture and speakers (dark “espresso”/black), not the “oak” in the renderings. The control panels are 3/4″ MDF, which will be painted black (and likely covered with vinyl decals, if I get a design together than I like). The top is also going to be 3/4″ MDF, so with glass it has a standard 1″ thickness. No one makes glass clips for 1/2″ cabinet tops.

These renderings don’t include the openings for the speakers, the pinball buttons on the spinner-end of the table, the start buttons, or the USB ports (which would be visible in the rendering). I’m aggregating together quite a few e-mails worth of details about them to get to Haruman today to get them updated.

The openings behind the control panels are something I’m still debating on. Some people apparently fill that area with translucent plastic and back-light it to get some illumination on the controls. I may just fill that space with the birch plywood because the controls all light up anyway. But I’m still debating.