Shakensoul
Forerunner
In my endeavor to mod a transparent side panel myself, I found these beautiful guides and I decided to format and customise it for fellow newbie members.
Link 1
Link 2
Cutting a freestyle, low profile window.
Become a Dremel Jedi; learn the techniques and tricks of cutting your case by adding a freestyle, low-profile window.
In this article, sparks fly as we put the Dremel rotary tool to our case panel. The Dremel tool is certainly not the only way to cut your case, but it offers a great deal of control and flexibility in experienced hands. Beginning modders ask more questions about the Dremel tool than almost anything else, so we’ll take you through cutting a window. Along the way you’ll meet the tool and learn the techniques that get professional looking results.
This is a freestyle window mod with a unique, custom shape.
Window mods draw a lot of attention, especially in conjunction with lighting effects. Window kits offer a prefabricated solution, but designing and cutting your own freestyle window lets you stand out even more. You can vary the shape, size, or orientation of your window cutout to achieve a huge variety of effects to further the custom look of your modded case. Window moulding can help conceal mistakes in cutting, but with some practice and the right techniques, you can have a low-profile window cutout that doesn’t need moulding to look finished.
In addition to your rotary tool, you’ll need a benchtop with room to clamp your panel, masking tape, and protective goggles. Clamping the workpiece to a secure surface prevents it from moving away from your tool bit when you cut. Masking the finished surface of your panel will reduce the likelihood of damage if your tool bit jumps. Some people prefer to cut from the back of the panel. In order to visualise the position and layout of our window opening, we’ll cut on the finished side. I’ll show you some marks made by the bit jumping, but since we’ll be painting this case (in a future article), even these minor marks will get sanded and eventually vanish. If you’ve already painted your case, you can still cut a window with excellent results, although cutting first and then painting is preferable.
Always wear eye protection when working with a rotary tool.
Using a carpenter’s square allows marking out the area of our window and keeping edges running exactly parallel to the panel edges. Masking the painted panel makes it easier to mark with a pencil. Leaving a two-inch border around the window cutout keeps enough metal to make sure the panel retains its stiffness.
A carpenter’s square is a highly useful modding tool.
A rotary tool can cut a window in almost any shape you can imagine. Rounded corners on an overall rectangular window keep a strong geometric feel while picking up on the curved shape of the case handles we installed. Adding a “kickout†to our window shape increases the custom look and allows us to keep the handle that’s stamped into this case panel. To get a consistent radius on rounded corners, use a template. In this case an 80mm CD served the purpose. Lining it up with the corners and tracing gives a consistent radius to all the corners.
Use a round object for a radius template.
The radius corners are all marked out for cutting.
There are dozens of different bits for a rotary tool, but the fiberglass-reinforced cutoff wheel remains a consistent favorite for cutting steel cases. Regular cutoff wheels work as well, but they shatter more easily. Cutoff wheels make it easier to cut a straight line freehand than other bits. Having a flexible shaft is a nice feature, but by no means is it necessary. Many times a shaft attachment comes in a kit with the tool. If your tool didn’t, don’t worry. It will cut just as well without it.
The Dremel multipro with Flex shaft and fiberglass reinforced cutoff wheel.
The thinner grip of the flex shaft is easier to handle, but the tool has to be supended overhead.
The real secret to making clean cuts is to let the speed of the tool do the work for you. A cutoff wheel is grinding away the metal along its edge. The tool motor spins that bit at up to 35,000 rpm, but as soon as you touch it to the work piece, friction slows it down. Using a light touch, draw the edge of the wheel along the line you marked, against the direction of rotation. You will see a very shallow groove form in the material. Sparks may fly in the direction you are moving the bit (probably not if you’re cutting aluminium, but almost certainly for steel). Even, steady hand motion is the key to keeping the bit traveling in a straight line. Here’s what the groove looks like after a single pass.
Oh yeah! sparks are flying!
Once you get a groove started, the bit will naturally want to follow it. Try to keep the depth of your groove fairly even. Do not force the bit through the workpiece. Draw it across the workpiece with a light touch, and back off the pressure if you hear the motor slowing down. If you use the flex shaft, you won’t want to use top speed, but with the bit mounted directly to the tool, you can. You may find that backing the speed down a bit from the highest setting makes the tool easier to control. Practice on some scrap until you have a good feel for the tool.
Light pressure on the bit, and let the rotation do the work.
The groove is not cut through the workpiece.
After a number of passes, you’ll feel the tool break through the panel. Right at this moment is when the bit has a tendency to jump out of the groove. The lighter your touch, the less of a problem this will be. Resist the urge to put the bit through the opening; it will jump around if it catches an edge.
This cut has just broken through the back.
Cutting a rounded corner is trickier than a straight line. It’s harder to advance the tool in a steady motion, but if you cut from inside the curve, you can place your hand and pivot the tool, adjusting your grip to get the radius you want. It’s natural for the width of your groove to increase a bit on a curve since the bit is straight. Repeated passes over the same path will get the job done. It’s better to leave a bit of material behind, especially on curves. It’s easy enough to sand or file the edge down once the cutting is finished.
Corner work is tricky, but you can handle smooth corners fine with a rotary tool.
Completing the cutout for this steel panel took around 90 minutes. I hear people complaining that cutoff wheels shatter easily–if you have the correct technique, they don’t. One wheel was enough to cut the entire window opening, and there was enough material left on the wheel that I kept it. Remember that you are using a fast-moving abrasive edge to grind away the material. Listen to the tool and you can hear when it gets less effective.
We’ve finished cutting.
So we remove the scrap from the cutout.
My used cutoff wheel and a new wheel for comparison–if you break wheels you are applying too much pressure.
The cut edge needs to be deburred. A file works well for removing the loose metal that the cutting leaves behind. Files can remove a lot of material, so if you need to straighten an edge, a flat file can help. If you just need to deburr, a light tough with the file gets the job done. Removing material takes considerably more pressure.
A file removes the burrs from the cut edge.
After deburring, our corners look much cleaner, but you see the wheel has a tendency to make a cut that looks more polygonal than rounded. A drum sander bit can remove material and even out the curvature of our rounded corners. Again, a light touch is called for because we want to avoid removing much material. Just shaping the curve is best accomplished with a medium speed and fairly long strokes that draw the bit over the rough edge. Sanding drums can really mess up your finish if you slip, so go carefully.
This corner could be smoother.
The sanding drum helped shape the radius corner.
The final step in finishing the cut edge is sanding. After sanding, the edge will be perfectly safe to touch, and feel as smooth (or smoother usually) as a factory finished edge. Using fine grit on a sanding block is just the thing for the straight edges. Once those are cleaned up, take the paper off and use your hands to finish the curved corners. You’ll feel any irregularities in the curves, and you can go back and address these with the sanding drum if they warrant it.
Basic sanding equipment: wet/dry sandpaper and a sanding block.
The flat edges of your cutout can be straightened and smoothed with a sanding block.
If you haven’t got a lot of confidence, you may want to cut from the back side of your panel. It’s quite easy to go a little astray when you are freehand cutting with a rotary tool. If you stray inside the cutout lines, no problem. But if you stray outside, you can mar the part of the panel you intend to leave behind. For this reason, cutting should be completed before you paint. It’s tough to avoid mistakes, but they can be minimised, and in our paint prep we can even go as far as repairing damage if need be. Small mistakes like this will disappear under a paint job, but you can use molding to cover bigger ones.
Mistakes happen. practice your cutting technique to avoid this.
Because we’ll be prepping and painting this panel (and the rest of the case), fitting a window inside the panel needs to wait. But it’s not difficult at all. Cut a piece of acrylic (clear, or tinted) to fit the window opening, and mount it to the backside of your panel. Popular options include double-sided tape, epoxy, and silicone caulk. I favor the silicone because it gives a flush fit, holds well and allows you to remove the window later if you need to. Rivets or screws work great too, but you’ll need to drill for them. We’ll use silicone to keep a low-profile, clean look that continues the theme we established with our handles and stealth blowhole in the top panel.
Cutting is complete, but we’re going to be painting this beige boy.
I used a knife to open up the side of the electric wire. This way I could get that copper wiring out and have a cheap tube to be placed around the edges of the window.
Tube installed. Used a few drops of superglue on the corners to keep it in place.
Window installed. I used glass silicone as a glue to attach the acrylic.
Dremel Don’ts, or, how to know when you’re doing it wrong
+ Don’t apply much pressure on the bit. You’ll shatter a cutoff wheel, and you’ll damage the bearings on the tool.
+ Don’t try to cut through the material in one pass. Use several passes to make a groove that gets slightly deeper each time.
+ Don’t move the bit in the direction of rotation. Rotary tool bits are likely to catch the workpiece, skip, and damage your finish.
+ Don’t run the tool continuously. Give yourself and the tool a break after 10-15 minutes of cutting.
+ Don’t let the workpiece slow the bit down. Let the speed do the work, and lighten your touch until you hear the motor spin back up toward speed.
+ Don’t use a ground-down cutoff wheel. Change out your wheel for a full sized one, and you’ll get better speed and more effective cutting action. Keep the small ones around for details and corner work though.
There’s more than one way to cut a window
You don’t have to use a Dremel tool for cutting windows. Jigsaws work great, and many people get windows cut by machinists using expensive tools like water jets or lasers. If you need an intricate design, and you don’t mind producing a CAD drawing of it, having a window cut by a machinist gives great results. But face it, seeing those sparks flying while you buzz away at your panel with a Dremel is a reward unto itself. And you can take serious pride in doing the work yourself–that’s the best part of case modding.
Link 1
Link 2
Cutting a freestyle, low profile window.
Become a Dremel Jedi; learn the techniques and tricks of cutting your case by adding a freestyle, low-profile window.
In this article, sparks fly as we put the Dremel rotary tool to our case panel. The Dremel tool is certainly not the only way to cut your case, but it offers a great deal of control and flexibility in experienced hands. Beginning modders ask more questions about the Dremel tool than almost anything else, so we’ll take you through cutting a window. Along the way you’ll meet the tool and learn the techniques that get professional looking results.
This is a freestyle window mod with a unique, custom shape.
Window mods draw a lot of attention, especially in conjunction with lighting effects. Window kits offer a prefabricated solution, but designing and cutting your own freestyle window lets you stand out even more. You can vary the shape, size, or orientation of your window cutout to achieve a huge variety of effects to further the custom look of your modded case. Window moulding can help conceal mistakes in cutting, but with some practice and the right techniques, you can have a low-profile window cutout that doesn’t need moulding to look finished.
In addition to your rotary tool, you’ll need a benchtop with room to clamp your panel, masking tape, and protective goggles. Clamping the workpiece to a secure surface prevents it from moving away from your tool bit when you cut. Masking the finished surface of your panel will reduce the likelihood of damage if your tool bit jumps. Some people prefer to cut from the back of the panel. In order to visualise the position and layout of our window opening, we’ll cut on the finished side. I’ll show you some marks made by the bit jumping, but since we’ll be painting this case (in a future article), even these minor marks will get sanded and eventually vanish. If you’ve already painted your case, you can still cut a window with excellent results, although cutting first and then painting is preferable.
Always wear eye protection when working with a rotary tool.
Using a carpenter’s square allows marking out the area of our window and keeping edges running exactly parallel to the panel edges. Masking the painted panel makes it easier to mark with a pencil. Leaving a two-inch border around the window cutout keeps enough metal to make sure the panel retains its stiffness.
A carpenter’s square is a highly useful modding tool.
A rotary tool can cut a window in almost any shape you can imagine. Rounded corners on an overall rectangular window keep a strong geometric feel while picking up on the curved shape of the case handles we installed. Adding a “kickout†to our window shape increases the custom look and allows us to keep the handle that’s stamped into this case panel. To get a consistent radius on rounded corners, use a template. In this case an 80mm CD served the purpose. Lining it up with the corners and tracing gives a consistent radius to all the corners.
Use a round object for a radius template.
The radius corners are all marked out for cutting.
There are dozens of different bits for a rotary tool, but the fiberglass-reinforced cutoff wheel remains a consistent favorite for cutting steel cases. Regular cutoff wheels work as well, but they shatter more easily. Cutoff wheels make it easier to cut a straight line freehand than other bits. Having a flexible shaft is a nice feature, but by no means is it necessary. Many times a shaft attachment comes in a kit with the tool. If your tool didn’t, don’t worry. It will cut just as well without it.
The Dremel multipro with Flex shaft and fiberglass reinforced cutoff wheel.
The thinner grip of the flex shaft is easier to handle, but the tool has to be supended overhead.
The real secret to making clean cuts is to let the speed of the tool do the work for you. A cutoff wheel is grinding away the metal along its edge. The tool motor spins that bit at up to 35,000 rpm, but as soon as you touch it to the work piece, friction slows it down. Using a light touch, draw the edge of the wheel along the line you marked, against the direction of rotation. You will see a very shallow groove form in the material. Sparks may fly in the direction you are moving the bit (probably not if you’re cutting aluminium, but almost certainly for steel). Even, steady hand motion is the key to keeping the bit traveling in a straight line. Here’s what the groove looks like after a single pass.
Oh yeah! sparks are flying!
Once you get a groove started, the bit will naturally want to follow it. Try to keep the depth of your groove fairly even. Do not force the bit through the workpiece. Draw it across the workpiece with a light touch, and back off the pressure if you hear the motor slowing down. If you use the flex shaft, you won’t want to use top speed, but with the bit mounted directly to the tool, you can. You may find that backing the speed down a bit from the highest setting makes the tool easier to control. Practice on some scrap until you have a good feel for the tool.
Light pressure on the bit, and let the rotation do the work.
The groove is not cut through the workpiece.
After a number of passes, you’ll feel the tool break through the panel. Right at this moment is when the bit has a tendency to jump out of the groove. The lighter your touch, the less of a problem this will be. Resist the urge to put the bit through the opening; it will jump around if it catches an edge.
This cut has just broken through the back.
Cutting a rounded corner is trickier than a straight line. It’s harder to advance the tool in a steady motion, but if you cut from inside the curve, you can place your hand and pivot the tool, adjusting your grip to get the radius you want. It’s natural for the width of your groove to increase a bit on a curve since the bit is straight. Repeated passes over the same path will get the job done. It’s better to leave a bit of material behind, especially on curves. It’s easy enough to sand or file the edge down once the cutting is finished.
Corner work is tricky, but you can handle smooth corners fine with a rotary tool.
Completing the cutout for this steel panel took around 90 minutes. I hear people complaining that cutoff wheels shatter easily–if you have the correct technique, they don’t. One wheel was enough to cut the entire window opening, and there was enough material left on the wheel that I kept it. Remember that you are using a fast-moving abrasive edge to grind away the material. Listen to the tool and you can hear when it gets less effective.
We’ve finished cutting.
So we remove the scrap from the cutout.
My used cutoff wheel and a new wheel for comparison–if you break wheels you are applying too much pressure.
The cut edge needs to be deburred. A file works well for removing the loose metal that the cutting leaves behind. Files can remove a lot of material, so if you need to straighten an edge, a flat file can help. If you just need to deburr, a light tough with the file gets the job done. Removing material takes considerably more pressure.
A file removes the burrs from the cut edge.
After deburring, our corners look much cleaner, but you see the wheel has a tendency to make a cut that looks more polygonal than rounded. A drum sander bit can remove material and even out the curvature of our rounded corners. Again, a light touch is called for because we want to avoid removing much material. Just shaping the curve is best accomplished with a medium speed and fairly long strokes that draw the bit over the rough edge. Sanding drums can really mess up your finish if you slip, so go carefully.
This corner could be smoother.
The sanding drum helped shape the radius corner.
The final step in finishing the cut edge is sanding. After sanding, the edge will be perfectly safe to touch, and feel as smooth (or smoother usually) as a factory finished edge. Using fine grit on a sanding block is just the thing for the straight edges. Once those are cleaned up, take the paper off and use your hands to finish the curved corners. You’ll feel any irregularities in the curves, and you can go back and address these with the sanding drum if they warrant it.
Basic sanding equipment: wet/dry sandpaper and a sanding block.
The flat edges of your cutout can be straightened and smoothed with a sanding block.
If you haven’t got a lot of confidence, you may want to cut from the back side of your panel. It’s quite easy to go a little astray when you are freehand cutting with a rotary tool. If you stray inside the cutout lines, no problem. But if you stray outside, you can mar the part of the panel you intend to leave behind. For this reason, cutting should be completed before you paint. It’s tough to avoid mistakes, but they can be minimised, and in our paint prep we can even go as far as repairing damage if need be. Small mistakes like this will disappear under a paint job, but you can use molding to cover bigger ones.
Mistakes happen. practice your cutting technique to avoid this.
Because we’ll be prepping and painting this panel (and the rest of the case), fitting a window inside the panel needs to wait. But it’s not difficult at all. Cut a piece of acrylic (clear, or tinted) to fit the window opening, and mount it to the backside of your panel. Popular options include double-sided tape, epoxy, and silicone caulk. I favor the silicone because it gives a flush fit, holds well and allows you to remove the window later if you need to. Rivets or screws work great too, but you’ll need to drill for them. We’ll use silicone to keep a low-profile, clean look that continues the theme we established with our handles and stealth blowhole in the top panel.
Cutting is complete, but we’re going to be painting this beige boy.
I used a knife to open up the side of the electric wire. This way I could get that copper wiring out and have a cheap tube to be placed around the edges of the window.
Tube installed. Used a few drops of superglue on the corners to keep it in place.
Window installed. I used glass silicone as a glue to attach the acrylic.
Dremel Don’ts, or, how to know when you’re doing it wrong
+ Don’t apply much pressure on the bit. You’ll shatter a cutoff wheel, and you’ll damage the bearings on the tool.
+ Don’t try to cut through the material in one pass. Use several passes to make a groove that gets slightly deeper each time.
+ Don’t move the bit in the direction of rotation. Rotary tool bits are likely to catch the workpiece, skip, and damage your finish.
+ Don’t run the tool continuously. Give yourself and the tool a break after 10-15 minutes of cutting.
+ Don’t let the workpiece slow the bit down. Let the speed do the work, and lighten your touch until you hear the motor spin back up toward speed.
+ Don’t use a ground-down cutoff wheel. Change out your wheel for a full sized one, and you’ll get better speed and more effective cutting action. Keep the small ones around for details and corner work though.
There’s more than one way to cut a window
You don’t have to use a Dremel tool for cutting windows. Jigsaws work great, and many people get windows cut by machinists using expensive tools like water jets or lasers. If you need an intricate design, and you don’t mind producing a CAD drawing of it, having a window cut by a machinist gives great results. But face it, seeing those sparks flying while you buzz away at your panel with a Dremel is a reward unto itself. And you can take serious pride in doing the work yourself–that’s the best part of case modding.
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