Project 65XE: I cut you up so bad ...

Entry posted by Osgeld September 22, 2017

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in this post I am going to take a fairly nice 65XE case, and put a big arse hole right in the face of it, lets put our big boy pants on!

This of course is for the LCD Screen of the integrated SIO2SD

First I am going to place the LCD screen roughly where I want it, on the 65XE the most appropriate place for a standard screen seems to be right in the middle of the case badge, from there I will roughly mark it with a pencil and a square

then drill out the corners well away from my lines

on the underside there are some ribs to be removed, so I used a razor saw to cut the upright sections, and a sharp knife to score the bottoms, then easily breaking them out with a pair of pliers. Cleanup is followed up with a chisel, not to make it perfectly pretty, but to remove any plastic nubs and uneveness that could interfere with the LCD PCB later

next i cut out the bulk of the material, there are plenty of ways to do this in my arsenal I could have used a dremel, I could have taken it to work and jigged it up in the bridgeport, I could have used a hot knife, I used my shiv. Yep I used a prison weapon, as its a broken off coping saw blade jammed in a off brand Xacto handle. its fast its aggressive its quiet (which is a must with a sleeping 2 year old).

It was on my desk, and it did the trick... this is bulk material removal not precision work, stay within the rough lines and all is good.

after bulk material removal I went back and made more accurate measurements, and marked them out with a sharpie and my square, I then used a utility knife to whittle down close but not on my lines, which is just less crap to have to file away later on.

finally we are starting to get down to the nitty gritty, using files ... these are not special files, hell it was the cheapest set at home depot cause I had a gift card with like 10 bucks left on it. there's a couple tricks to it

Go slow, files only really work on the push stroke, as you push go sideways long the surface to be filed, dont apply (any significant) pressure into the material, that only makes your hand twist

pushing the file while skating it along the length of the hole can provide some impressively accurate results with little effort (and checking along the way)

once all 4 sides are done you end up with a nice square rectangular hole, yea there's some fine tuning to be done with some 400-600 grit paper to knock off the burs, but for now the LCD is a good tight snap fit within the hole, with enough room for an acrylic lens to finish things off

(ps I dont know what's going on in that last picture, my stupid phone likes to fisheye shadows, so while the right side of the screen looks like its all out of whack its actually dead nuts on in reality)