Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Cutting of the pie panels.

Holy crap! First all, this takes forever, about 4 hours to get everything you see here complete. In the end, it looks FANTASTIC with a few minor glitches that I can fix later.

First I want to show all my pie panels drawn out. They are numbered how they are on the outer dome so that I will be able to match them up easier.



Next up, I start drilling hundreds of tiny holes all around the pie panels......this takes forever. I did it without stopping and only broke 3 drill bits!











Next, I had to get the panels out! I did this a unique way. I used my Dremel with a reinforced disk, what I did, was slowly trace along the edge of the drill holes so that I had a "track".......then on one end of the drill holes, I used the Dremel to go ALL THE WAY down through the aluminum.....like pictured below.





Then, what I did was throw some WD40 on there, take my hack saw with a handle, and quickly and easily cut the piece out.



Next up, was to file the inner dome cutouts....I started slowly.



Eventually, I got them all fairly smooth. I will still go over them again at a later date to make them even smoother, but so far I am more than pleased.

Next, I had to do what any guy would do........test it with my outer dome! As you can see, the results are pretty good!!! I wanted to start filing the cutout pieces (that attach to the bottom of the pie panels) but decided it was time to take a break for a day or so and recoup from this long mess! Here are the test pictures!!



No comments:

Post a Comment