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Hi everyone, as some of you know I recently posted asking about how to put legends onto korry switches.
Well I had a new idea, what about getting the clear acrylic 20 x 20mm cubes( thats what Im using) Painting them black, stick them in the laser cutter and etching the legends on. That way it saves all the other materials needed.
I understand not everyone has acces to a laser cutter, I dont dont personally, only at school.
Im going to try this and I will post my results on here.
Jake
Hi Jake,
Good news about having access to a laser cutter - That will be very useful to you.
If it will engrave text characters down to around 3 - 3.5mm it will be great for making panels.
I'm not familiar with the 20x20mm style of Korry used on the 747, but I assume they are similarly made to the 1"x0.5" used on the 737.
How will you get the back colour though ?
How you approach this will depend on whether you need the entire area of the button to illuminate with one colour, and the text with another - For example the blue buttons on the 737 which have clear text on blue background.
It is easier I think, if you need the main face area of the button to stay dark and just illuminate the text in a particular colour.
There appears to be more than one technique used on the rectangular Korries I have here to do this.
On one type though (630-5341-001), the lens is clear 1mm painted matt black and then engraved. The back colour is produced by a thin piece of filter material (as used in stage lighting) positioned in front of a pair of filament lamps in the rear housing.
If you do as you propose, and paint the sides and front of your 20mm cubes black, then engrave the text, you could perhaps use coloured LEDS for your backcolour, avoiding the need for a filter.
If you need the whole face to light, then you could perhaps get some filter material and stick it onto your cube, then engrave through it ?
I would be interested to hear your findings.
Cheers,
Rob
Hey Jake,
Another option you might want to look at is taking 2, 20X10mm clear acrylic blocks, paint them white then black, with the exception of the top face (the face where the legend will be engraved) wich will remain clear, glue those two together to get your 20X20mm block, but it will have two cavitys, one for the top legend, one for the bottom,take a piece of P800 wet and dry paper, tape it down to a flat table and put a small ammount of water on it, take your block place it clear face down on the wet and dry paper, apply firm pressure and move it around in a figure of 8 pattern, this will sand both faces so they are more or less perfectly allign with each other and you wont feel the gap where the two blocks are glued together and it will prep it for paint.
Paint the clear faces matt black and allow to dry.
I dont know what machine you use but it wont be much different to mine, on your machine you will have an option for "air blow", turn this off, generally faster works better, on mine i set the speed to 400mm/s, laser power to 66% and the scan gap to 0.05mm, but like i said i dont know whats best on the machine you are using, your best bet is to take a piece of acrylic sheet, paint it black and do your trials and testing on that before you try it on the blocks themselves
Let us know how you get on