7/13/17
Aside from varnishing, I pretty much finished up the control panel today. And I also screwed it up, but then I fixed my screw-up so it's all good.
I didn't get photos of the last cuts, but I made the front, curved cut, and two notches at the back of the control panel with the scroll saw today. The front cut was another extremely careful one because there was no fixing it if I messed it up. It took a while, but ended up about as good as I could expect.
Then I went to round over the edges of the control panel with the router. This is where I screwed up. You will see a slight difference in the shape of the panel between the first and second pictures attached to this post. When I was routing the edges, I initially slipped and went in too fast with the router, catching the vinyl and ripping a piece off. Thankfully, the problem area was small enough that I could just round the back corners on the belt sander to get rid of the mistake. Then I realized I like it better this way so I'm actually glad I screwed up with the routing!
After that was done I very carefully drilled all of the required holes with a hole saw in the drill press. This was done verrry slowly so as not to rip the vinyl in the process. In the end, it came out just as I'd hoped it would. It's attached to the cabinet with four magnets so it's very easy to remove to get to the future guts of the system. It can move slightly so I'm going to have to add something to secure it, but still keep it easy to remove. Still thinking on that one.
Once I was done with that, I soldered up a plug to the marquee light, tested it out, and secured the wire to the inside of the cabinet.
That pretty much brings us up to date, finally. I didn't do anything with it yesterday as I was waiting for my varnish to come in. I put the first coat on today, and will lightly sand and add coats every day for basically the next week. While I'm doing that, I'm also setting up some of the electrical stuff so I'll probably update on Sunday. Other than that, there's not going to be much of anything to update until I get the varnishing done and start working on the fun stuff. If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading!