•  The design I'm going to use for the control panel rendered:
• (its changed since I started. Rounded front edge now. lets see if the cab looks the same!)

I Finally got a start on the control panel, yanked out the tablesaw and started dicing up the mdf. Of course, I gave kiddo (my 6 year old) the nice cushy job of taking pictures. Well, lets just say there are a lot of feet, fingers, flowers, rocks, and pictures of other things, but no cutting pics. Pretty basic at that point, cut mdf on saw, apply glue to all joining edges, air nail into place.

	Heres the base, all built up, everything worked out great! a couple of the angles were a bit difficult to cut on the tablesaw, but some creative thinking, and a couple of shims helped out.
	The CP Top, and the custom trackball mount getting lined up and marked for routing and drilling.
	Closeup of the trackball mounting plate. fits perfect! Heres a note, when cutting 1/4" aluminum plate with a flycutter..... Make sure the flycutter is VERY tight..... No deaths, but it scared the crap out of me!
	Paper templates marked up and placed on the cp to check the layout. The templates were 1:1 scale, and measured out dead on, so I just pasted them in place and used them to mark the centers with a small drill bit before moving up to the hole saw.
	Here you can see the trackball template moved back. I drilled all the mounting holes, marked the TB cutout with a hole at each of the corners, and marked the outter limits of the mounting plate.
	(need to get a new router bit...) forgot to take some pics during, but after clamping 4 straight edges to the CP, the distance from the bit to the edge of my router base around the mounting panels perimeter, (does that make sense?) I had a nice guide for the router. I slowly stepped it down, and routed out all the MDF down to the thickness of the mounting plate. I left the middle as you can see as its going to be removed anyway.
	On the other side, you can see my pilot hole for the jigsaw, and the corner holes for the cutout area served for me to draw a line of where to cut.
	TADA!!!
	Again I forgot to take some pics, but basically, get a 29mm hole saw (1 1/8") and using the pilot holes as a template cut out your button holes. Only cut half way through on the top for all the holes, them flip it over and cut through from the back. This will keep the board from "Breaking out" and leave a nice finished hole. For the joystick mounts, I used a 1" forstner bit and cut in about 1/8", then drilled the hole the rest of the way with a drill bit the same size as my 10-24 tee-nuts. I hammered them in and secured them with epoxy. I don't trust tee-nuts to to come free later on as its happened to me tooo many times.....
	Piano hinge mounted to the front edge of the bottom...
	All set in place, fits perfect! Now I just need to get it finished!
	Decided to not go with a big radius edge and just threw a french curve on it. Still looks great! (and cut the holes I forgot before)
	Set the parts up on some wood and primed away! (Canadian Beer has oooohhhh so many good uses...)

Now while I wait for the paint to dry, its off to fix up the site (what I'm doing now) and to wire up the joysticks. NOTE!!! When using beer cases for stands, If you want a beer AFTER you finish painting... TAKE IT OUT BEFORE YOU PAINT! (I learned the hard way)