Golden Tee: Control Panel Progess

I’ve made a great deal of progress on the Golden Tee control panel.  I had a spare piece of 3/4″ plywood that appeared to be about the right size for fashioning a control panel base.  I took the control panel overlay that I purchased, placed it on top of the plywood and traced the outside edges, button holes and trackball opening.  I cut the straight areas of the control panel base with a circular saw and the rounded corners with a jig saw.  The button holes were cut with a 1 1/8″ hole saw.  Plywood was not necessarily my material of choice but it was available and saved me a trip to the home improvement store.

After the basic shape of the base was cut, it was time to figure out how to mount the trackball.  The Golden Tee operation manual that I have has a template for cutting the trackball but it was over-scaled by about 1/4″ and was of no use.  Using the trackball hole that I traced, I reached back to my high school math days and determined the center point of the hole and thus the center of the trackball.  It was easy after that to lay everything out from the center point.  The mounting plate needed to be recessed in the base about 1/8″ so the control panel overlay will sit flush over it.  I used my router and a straight bit to cut out the material.  I then realized the the buttons were not going to extend all of the way through the control panel, so I routed material away from each button hole so I could fasten the nut.  I threw a coat of black paint on it to keep the wood from showing through the control panel overlay.  I’m not a master craftsman and have a very limited set of tools so it’s not pretty, but nobody is every going to see it anyway:

You can see the routed area for the mounting plate in the first picture and the area around the buttons in the second.  No, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time sanding the areas to make them look perfect.  Once the control panel overlay is on and the panel is mounted to the cabinet, those areas won’t be seen at all.  Next, I drilled four holes for bolts of the track ball mounting plate and attached it to the base with nuts and washers:

You can see how the plate sits flush with the top of the base.  I then attached the trackball to the mounting plate and installed the buttons:

Finally, it was time to attach the control panel overlay. I temporarily attached it with about 4 screws. The screws I had are too small so I won’t secure it completely until I have the proper size:

The control panel base itself is pretty ugly and looks like an amateur carpenter built it. With the overlay installed, it looks pretty good and I’m happy with the results. The next problem to tackle: when I center the overlay on the cabinet, the left camera button sits right on top of the cabinet edge.  The easy solution is to hack away a bit of the cabinet and build a new base around the control panel but I’m going to have to weigh my options as I want to keep the cabinet as close to original as possible. I’ll be honest, at this point I’d prefer someone offer me an empty, original Golden Tee cabinet but that’s not likely to happen and my 19″ monitor wouldn’t look quite right in one.