First Dome Hole Cut

After a lot of thinking and consulting with Victor and Calvin I decide I’m pretty much done with the dome sanding/fitting. There’s some minor gaps but I can tweak them later and some may work themselves out for various reasons and decisions later.

I think I’ve been procrastinating and using the gaps as an excuse not to starting cutting some holes, so tonight was the night.

I started off with an easy one – the front holoprojector. It went a lot quicker and easier than I’d thought and the result was excellent if I do say so myself.

Basic Steps

  • Overlay outer dome and mark circle.
  • Find center of circle using some quick math.
  • Decide on diameter of hole to cut and first mark with a compass then set the drill hole cutting tool the same.
  • Double check slightly larger marked hole with outer dome again.
  • Center punch hole.
  • Drill pilot hole.
  • Drill hole the same size as drill cutting tool bit.
  • Start cutting.
  • At some point I broke thru on some spots so stopped.
  • Dremeled pie wedges using a reinforced cut-off wheel and snapped off the pieces when done.
  • File off burrs, hold breath and test fit.

That’s it, and to be honest it was pretty easy really. I’d decide to make the hole exactly the same diameter as the outer hole. If I screwed up I figured I could always sand/file it bigger, but making it too big might be a problem. The holoprojector fit perfectly and a quick test fit of the dome looked really good.

Check out this video of my wobbling/bobbing drill bit.

I was about to drill another when the battery died on my cordless drill, so I’ll have to wait till tomorrow now.

Posted by Chris on January 4th, 2007 in Dome | 2 Comments

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2 Responses

  1. FloridaRobot remarks on

    This blog entry helped me tremendously !!!! The link to the method of finding the center of a circle using geometry was extremely helpful. Thanks

  2. Chris remarks on

    Cool, I’m glad it helped.

    My golden rule is always double check everything I post. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve gotten wrong during this build 😀

    Cheers
    Chris

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