Cutting through control panel overlay?

[ThePaul]

Well good luck tonight, I'll be right there with you  

[sofakng]

Best of luck to both of us!

[FractalWalk]

If you are using something like a mounting plate or plexiglass as a guide, it's really hard to screw it up.

I was very worried about cutting my trackball hole, but I'm very happy with the results.

[ThePaul]

Well how did it turn out sofa? Mine came out pretty good, almost without a hitch. Except my artwork budged a little bit while trimming and there is a tiny bit of white showing at the top.. but oh well..

can see some photos here

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=10;action=display;threadid=21284&start=0

[sofakng]

Your control panel looks good!  VERY good!!  I'm glad to see that it came out very good for you.

Last night I only had time to build the control panel box... I'm beginning to think that whatever time you think something will take, double it.  I'll probably be cutting the overlay tonight (well, I hope....).  

Did you build the cabinet yet?  My control panel box seems to sit on the cabinet waaaay too high... (check here for my thread about it: http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=22700)

Keep us updated on your project  It's coming out great!

[ThePaul]

I'll be building the cab next. When you're married you have to go in baby steps. Now that this part is done she can see that I'm serious and it is worth the extra money and mess in the garage to build the rest

Can't wait to see what kind of problems I have building the cab!

[sofakng]

Well, last night I finally decided to be brave and start cutting my artwork...

It came out GREAT!

The mdf, artwork, and plexiglass all line up pretty good.  There are a few buttons that don't fit perfectly, but if I angled them slightly and work with it, they end up fitting just fine.

Tonight I'll be working a little more on the control panel box (eg. filling holes with putty, sanding, priming, painting, etc).

All thats left is mounting the smoked glass I have for in front of the monitor.  I already see a problem (there is a big gap between the control panel box and the monitor self).... but I'll post that in another thread.

In case anybody is wondering, I didn't use the pie-cutting method.  When I tried, I wasn't able to make enough pie slices (the artwork keep bunching-up [for lack of a better term]).  Instead, I used my exacto knife to make perfect circles by following the holes in the MDF.  I used the same method for the trackball hole.  It's not 100% perfect but it's pretty darn good in my opinion.

Thanks to everybody for all the help!

[Nannuu]

Around the trackball hole.  Take a marker with the same color ink as the surrounding print and color the edge of the paper.  Otherwise you have a funky white line you can see.  Just do it fast and light so that ink doesn't soak in and bleed outward.  All of the other holes are covered so they should be fine.

[sofakng]

Good idea!

It might be a little bit more complicated for me though.  When I was cutting the trackball hole in the plexiglass, I think some of the plexiglass melted (??) onto the trackball mounting plate.  I'm not sure if it was plexiglass or not, but it was quite sharp and definitely wasn't there before I cut the plexiglass hole.

To fix this, I used an air compressor and some sort of tool (it had various bits used to file away metal, etc) to remove the plexiglass from the mounting plate.  The edge around the inside hole of mounting plate is a little rough now but I cleaned it up the best I could... If I use a black marker it should be just fine.

Thanks for the tip!