Just to confirm something that I'm almost sure about.MB is using Astro City cabinets,right?I will buy a custom stick soon,so I want to know the layout of the melty blood machines.
Arcades put arcade boards into whichever cabinets they feel like. Nowadays there are all sorts of arcade cabinets, ranging from the HD (i.e. Viewlix, Delta32, etc.) to the SD (i.e. Astro City, Cyber Lead, etc.). For example, my arcade just got MBAACC and we put it into a Namco Cyber Lead cabinet, though if we wanted to, we could have put the game into an HD cabinet because the Ringwide board supports HD.
The only thing you want to worry about when building a custom stick based on an arcade cabinet, is which parts they use. Your biggest contenders for Japanese parts are Sanwa or Saimetsu. That goes for the sticks and for the buttons. When you're customizing your stick you also need to decide what sort of gate goes into it. The gate is what restricts your movement on a stick, which is necessary to press the switches on the stick. There are square gates, circle gates, and octagon gates. What stick and which gate they use depends entirely on which arcade you're going to. I'd recommend seeing what your local arcade has (if you have a local arcade), and then copy them. If you're gearing for an SBO tournament, I believe they use Sanwa square gates, but I'm not entirely sure.