Today I started putting together the Kraylix kit! But before the first screw even goes in, it’s time for my first mod.

One of the nice things about building a kit vs buying a pre-made cabinet is it’s quite easy to customize it to your needs. The Kraylix V4 2-player comes standard with holes for two 4″ speakers – That’s certainly fine for midrange and treble, but what about bass? I definitely think something a bit bigger is in order to get good full-range sound… So I started planning for the addition of a woofer to the cabinet. I happened to have a spare woofer from a subwoofer box whose amp overheated and fried itself dead – the woofer cone was fine, though, so this is a good way to re-use it! I cut a hole on the front panel and test fit the woofer – perfect fit!

Okay, I admit, I cheated a bit – I took this panel to a local car audio shop and they cut the hole for me. I don’t have a router and wanted a super clean cut circle… Car audio shops do this all the time since they commonly build speaker enclosures, so they did it for me – took them a whole minute and a half! The woofer as seen above may look small, but it’s an 8″ diameter speaker. The hole on the right is for a coin door, in case you’re curious.

Much easier to cut this hole before the panel built into the cabinet, of course. That was the next step, building the bottom of the cabinet. It went together super easily, pretty much like any flat-pack furniture would. Kray uses a combination of wood screws and locking cam-on-dowels. Here’s the bottom of the cabinet assembled – it took about 30 minutes of work at most: 

Next the tall side arms are installed and affixed using nuts and bolts (for easy disassembly later if needed), and the top arch is installed using wood screws and glue (hence the clamps). The glue will set overnight, so that’s it for today. Boy, this is starting to look like a real arcade game! Pretty cool!