Continuing with the “making holes in stuff” theme, tonight I decided to bite the bullet and get going on this most fun cutout of all. First I ha to finalize the position of the controller – much like with the air vent on the other side, there’s not really much room here to be flexible with the positioning. It’s even more notable here since the switched at the bottom of the panel wing are the larger 3PDT units, so I’ve got to allow for a bit more vertical space.
Unlike the big panel cutouts, here I did the rough cutting with a Dremel cutoff wheel rather than the jigsaw…much easier to set up since no pilot holes are needed. Enlarged the hole to near the outline with a cutting bit, and then went to work with a file. The fun part here is figuring out how to creep up on the final size when I have eight sides to deal with. The long sides aren’t that bad but the beveled corners require real care to try and not mess up the corners.
Anyway, tonight I got as far as getting the long sides done, along with one corner, and that seemed like a good time to call it a night. I suspect that tomorrow I can get this finalized, though really I’m only at a rough-cut stage still. Once I open the cutout to the lines, I’ll still probably have some fine-tuning to get the controller to fit precisely. And then there’s the fun of spotting and drilling the four mount holes – since the screws thread directly into the controller, I can’t really easily use the unit to lay out the screw holes.
But hey, if I can get this done, the rest is just drilling some switch holes, which should be a cakewalk…as long as I don’t mess anything up, that is…
