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I took the cabinet sides and used the circular saw to clean up some of the nastiness I left by using a spinsaw.  The trick is building a jig using a straight piece of wood and an aluminum guide.  You can use one edge of the wood to line up your cut and then use the aluminum to guide the saw in a straight line.

I also got the top of the control panel cut.  By the time I started I was getting pretty tired and really messed up the first cut.  Thankfully you can fix most cuts with more cutting.

My recommendation to anyone considering building a MAME cabinet: make sure you can commit for a couple of months.  For inexperienced woodworkers like myself, you’ll probably take a couple of hours to do cuts that a skilled worker could do in a few minutes.  I’m glad that I’ve been doing it- I can at least count myself as someone who can now use a power tool safely and figure out a way to make any basic cut that I need.

The MAME-cabinet-related posts are a little boring and repetitive, I know.  It’s mostly so I can keep a journal of when I’ve worked on it so I can string them together as a basic instruction guide after I’m done.  Bear with me!

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