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Painting and Assembly (Part 2) After another brief hiatus here's my next update and things are finally starting to come together. However I'm still not finished, so there'll be another build update after this followed by a concluding page with lots of gratuitous photos and movies. So, the wires; in all, I need:
So after fiddling with some small crimps, super glue and solder:
I managed to assemble all these cables and paint them black as shown in the picture below (displayed from left to right in the same order as listed above).
Well I don't think they look too shabby. Next: painting the faceplate. Now I originally masked off the areas with masking tape, seemed logical to me:
However the paint (both spray and acrylic) seeped underneath the tape and made a mess ;-( So I rubbed off the worst bits with white spirit and tried masking with parcel tape (as the gum has a smoother finish - they must have a term to describe this). This worked much better and after a little more cleaning I ended up with a reasonable finish.
To achieve the slightly metallic look I started by applying a thin film of metallic black spray paint, followed by a thick layer of black acrylic paint before garnishing with a few layers of ordinary (not gloss nor matt) black spray paint. (I also painted the ends of the bolts to match the colour scheme) Next, I cut the two side strips to support the faceplate and super-glued them to the base.
In order to position the screw holes for the i/o board on the base plate, I screwed the relevant components to the front and held it all together..
OK, so it looks a bit squished but generally everything seems happy; the white LEDs have just enough space to shine through the bottom clear part of the faceplate. One of my last design decisions is to choose a colour for the RX/Tx LED bezels: chrome or black.
hmmm... I'm going with... well, you'll just have to wait for next time to find out. Next week (honest): Painting and Assembly (Part 3) - the final assembly of the switches.. Week 1 (8th May 2006): The LCD Week 2 (15th May 2006): The Design Week 2 (still): The Shopping List Week 3 (22nd May 2006): The LCD arrives Week 4 (29th May 2006): The Redesign Week 5 (5th June 2006): Soldering Week 6 (26th June 2006): Plasticfantastic Week 7 (14th August 2006): Painting and assembly (Part 1) Week 8 (4th September 2006): Painting and assembly (Part 2) Week 9 (11th September 2006): Painting and assembly (Part 3) |
