As you can see in the finished image, there's a pretty clear inward slope on the right side-I did my best to mimic it on the left, and unless you're really squinting at the final product it looks even. Wood looks pretty straight until you scrutinize it from all angles and then it really does not look straight at all.Īfter an initial hour or two of power sanding to get the sides roughly square, I also did a ton of sanding by hand to round off all the edges, making them much more pleasant for wrists to rest against. Some sides would slope towards the top or bottom and/or left or right others would bulge or dip slightly somewhere in between. At this point I had to use the orbital sander to clean off that overhanging lip on the top panel and begin sanding down the sides, too, which is trickier than it sounds. We have a box! The controller pretty much looks the part at this point, but refining is a lengthy process. The cutting process was surprisingly painless, and once the interior block was gone we could use the Forstner bits again to drill the side button holes and then glue the top panel in place. We used a piece of tape on the blade to mark the depth we'd be cutting to, but using some cheap particle board as a backstop made it pretty easy to tell when we'd broken through the harder wood. Our process here was dictated by the kind of saw we had on hand-in this case we used an oscillating multi-tool to cut through the stacked wood vertically. With all that sketched out, we lined up several more pieces of the plywood and glued them together to serve as the body of the controller. This helped us determine how thick we could make the sides and how much extra wood to leave in the corners to give screws for the bottom panel plenty of security. With the button holes done, we drew a rough diagram on the top panel to figure out how the PCB would fit and where the side buttons (for Start, Select etc.) would fit, as well as where the hole for the USB plug would go. This would let us deal with the not-square edges later with an orbital sander. Instead we went for a "sandwich" approach, cutting the plywood into several pieces and layering it to create the thickness needed to fit all the internal parts. Because we didn't have a table saw or skilsaw (or a laser cutter, which would be even better), we decided it was going to be tricky to build a box-style controller like in this YouTube video. The saws you have access to will dictate how you go about building your controller.This can be fairly easily solved, but only if you have the right woodworking equipment. ![]()
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