You don’t need a professional and expensive workshop / tools / software to create amazing things ; )
Hi, my name is Urban Hernández, I always dreamed of building my own arcade machine. In my first attempt, back in 2012, I was really proud of hacking a keyboard to emulate a joystick input and to integrate a coin slot mechanism. The initial idea was to rent it in the cafeteria of the Engineering school where I was studying at the time. But the overall result was disappointing: It just looked horrible and not remotely close to what I had envisioned. With time I forgot about it and moved on with my life.
In 2017 I decided to try again and build my own arcade machine. Going on YouTube and finding a tutorial was easy but most of the tutorials assumed people had access to a fully equipped workshop with all the necessary materials, power tools, resources, etc. to build anything.
I tried searching for “cheap” tutorials but most of them -if not all- were click bait videos with fake / low quality -mainly useless- DIY hacks. I found myself stuck since I didn’t have access to a workshop, and my budget and space were limited… and the rabbit hole of weird DIY tutorial videos was getting bigger and bigger.
I took the challenge, closed all fake DIY video tabs 😜 and decided to go forward no matter what. I started to plan everything to list the minimum resources I would need to create a professional-looking arcade machine and, after a lot of careful planning, I finally built one in my apartment with no workshop / workbench and only 3 power tools:
- A drilling machine
- A jigsaw
- A wood router
After 6 months of hard work the arcade cabinet was finished. A blast from the past and, compared to my first attempt, the improvements are obvious.
With time I expanded my tiny workshop but I’m still limited by my flat (i.e. lack of space). A lot of my friends and family members were impressed by what I was able to craft in my rented flat, and suggested that I create a blog about it.
I am old enough to remember the good old Internet with forums, user groups and, of course, Gopher. While they certainly looked colorful and the graphics were funky, you could find experts in different fields answering your questions and sharing their knowledge.
Nowadays, with the exception of Wikipedia, most popular websites are plagued by obnoxious advertisement. Modern web design is dedicated to optimize search engine ranks and making sure you spend as much time as possible on their page even going as far as hiding delicious recipes behind a wall of text so you stay a bit longer on the page.
For this blog I wanted something different, I wanted it to be dedicated to people like you ❤️
Now of course I would like you to decide to spend your day reading my blog, but it should be because it has interesting content and not because I trick and manipulate visitors to spend time on it. With this blog I aim at inspiring you to craft amazing things with limited resources 🙂
Urban Hernández