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Acrylic drilling help

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Franco B:

--- Quote from: vast on October 07, 2011, 06:12:39 pm ---
--- Quote from: Franco B on October 07, 2011, 03:25:57 pm ---I actually need to do a similar job tomorrow if you would like me to take some photos.

--- End quote ---

That would be awesome Franco  :cheers:

--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: vast on October 15, 2011, 05:53:24 pm ---Followed Franco's advice and routed the holes, came out great  :cheers:

--- End quote ---

Apologies for not posting those photos. I did take them whilst working on that job but I completely forgot to post them  :-[ Anyway I'm glad to hear it came out ok  :cheers:

I would like to think I'm pretty good when working with plastics. I may put up a 'how to' thread myself.

As an example, I just finished this for a customer this week. Its a control panel and gun holder for a Sega 2Spicy cabinet. It was all hand routed on a router table and hand polished.














HaRuMaN:
Damn, dude...   :o :o :o

ChadTower:

Wow. 

opt2not:
*snip*

--- Quote from: Franco B on October 27, 2011, 11:46:34 am ---I would like to think I'm pretty good when working with plastics. I may put up a 'how to' thread myself.

--- End quote ---

^^ this.

 :applaud:

Cynicaster:
Wow, that gun holder piece is incredible.. nice work dude.

I busted a few pieces of acrylic when drilling my CPO.  I eventually settled on the following procedure, and it went very smoothly (this process assumes the acrylic and base CP material have already been size matched using a flush-trim bit):

- sandwich together CP, CP layout with "crosshairs" indicating hole locations, and acrylic
- using a small drill bit at high speed, drill a pilot for each hole through the sandwich
- disassemble sandwich, drill holes in CP with hole saw using pilot holes
- use pilot holes in acrylic to make slightly larger holes with a saw-edged hole saw with fine teeth**
- clamp together CP and acrylic so that the edges are nicely aligned, and route out the acrylic holes to size with a flush-trim bit

** These holes only need to be large enough to fit your router's flush trim bit.  I used a cheap-o set of $10 hole saws and it cut through the acrylic like butter, with no "tension" just waiting for something to break.  Very relaxed and stress free.  I think the key is fine teeth, if you went with larger and more spaced out teeth, it might not work.



This process is forgiving because it doesn't require you to be overly precise in any of the steps.  Rather than try to adhere to an exact fixed layout from the get-go, you just match the parts to each other as you go, and the result will always be parts that exactly match each other (if not exactly match your original layout down to the millimeter).  

  

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