Did you remember to soak it with some WD-40, or some kind of lubricant / coolant during your attempt?
Yes, the roloc and the surface were both lubricated while trying to engine turn. After thinking about it for a while, 3" circles may have be too big for that type of finish. The engine turning I had read about used 1/2" and 1" circles. Even though I didn't achieve what I originally set out to do, I'm very pleased with how the marquee looks now. It catches light very well. I might even use a strip of that same vinyl to go behind the invaders.
Now, on to my progress! I was finally able to order the rest of the buttons for the two joystick panels. I love the way these buttons have turned out, but man are they expensive. I have to order twice as many buttons as I need and with the RGBs an order of 50 buttons (to make 25 of these) is over $150. To mod all these buttons to what I consider ready to use took me around 6-7 hours total spread across a few days. You can see the first steps of modding the buttons for the RGBs in one of my earlier posts.
Here's one after the wires were hot glued around the holes to prevent any stress on the RGB board connections (thanks for the tip VanillaGorilla).
I cut the wires to my desired length (2.5" from the base of the button) and stripped the ends for the terminal pins.
With terminal pins crimped to the wire ends.
With the terminal pins installed into a male Molex 4 pin connector. These connectors will allow me to remove a button from my panels without cutting the RGB harness or having to pull terminal pins out of another connector (unlikely I will ever have to pull just a single button, but you never know and I don't want to hack up a harness later).
Here you can see that a microswitch can still be removed and installed without the pigtail harness getting in the way.
20 buttons are finished. I'm still waiting on more connectors to arrive to finish the last six. You can also see the new player buttons I got, they turned out better than expected with the translucent button bodies.
For anyone wanting to know (and for easy future reference for myself) the Molex part numbers are:
Male Connector - 0430250400
Female Connector - 0430200401
Pins for Male Connector - 0430300001
Pins for Female Connector - 0430310001
The part number for the die set that I used (die sets easily swap out in the jaws of the orange crimpers) that crimps the terminal pins is HT-236-2C4-DIE (not a Molex number).