Best kind of plywood to buy?

Thomas

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When patching a machine down at the bottom and sides what best to use?

For instance I have a ms pac cab that looks like ass. The bottom is made from particle board. The sides seem like they are made from 3/4 ply. So I need to go buy some materials to fix it.

Whats best to buy... Plywood with one side smooth both sides what? Should I replace the particle board with ply?
 
See if they have baltic birch.. it has an awesome surface on it, and you should be able to buy a 4X6 sheet or a 4X4 sheet since your only making patch panels. If your replacing parts on a particle board or MDF cabinet, use what it was originally. Plywood runs about 3/32" of an inch undersize, where mdf and particle board are true 3/4" thick, so you won't get any mismatch.
 
Did they use the same on the bottoms of the Nintendo Cabs?
See if they have baltic birch.. it has an awesome surface on it, and you should be able to buy a 4X6 sheet or a 4X4 sheet since your only making patch panels. If your replacing parts on a particle board or MDF cabinet, use what it was originally. Plywood runs about 3/32" of an inch undersize, where mdf and particle board are true 3/4" thick, so you won't get any mismatch.
 
Watch out for the quality of the plywood. You'd think whatever you pick up at Lowes or HD would be good stuff, especially when it's not cheap. Not necessarily so. What we're doing here is far from fine furniture, but for guys in fine woodworking, they generally regard stuff from the big box stores as crap. It's usually lower quality plywood, as far as voids in the middle layers, knots, etc..

That said, for this work, I buy from Lowes or HD, but you gotta watch out. I bought a 2x4 sheet of 1/2" birch ply from Home Depot today. They had 3 sheets on the rack left. One had a lot of mildew staining, one some mildew and warped badly, and I got the other. I'll have to cut all the edges off and re-square it up, but it'll do fine. I've had to discard bunches of sheets of 7/16" sheathing plywood at Lowes due to mildew/mold. Just look it over closely before you take it home, see how straight it is, look for mildew..
 
Plywood

I repaired the bottome of my old Galaxian cabinet with some 1" pine, this was exactly the same size of the 3/4" original plywood.
After I was done I remembered that when I was doing some work at ICE the guy there gave me a bunch of sheets of coated plywood. They must have the wood specially made for them since it was exactly 3/4" thick. (For those of you wondering what ICE is, they make video games, one of the more popular is Deal or no Deal.)
 
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