The control panel takes shape

After taking a lot of care while building the baseboard, I got a little overconfident.  The control panel is a story of measure once, cut several times, then squeeze everything in as best as possible.  I planned the mimic diagram to be A4 in size, which I had imagined would give me a lot of room to fit things in.  After I'd bought and cut a sheet of perspex it became apparent that this was a little optimistic.

In the end, I managed to squeeze things in.  The main constraint was that the switches and LED mounts I had bought needed 6mm holes in the panel; this meant that I couldn't shrink things too much without them getting crowded together.

The idea was that the top of the panel would be made from a sandwich of 3mm perspex, a paper printout of the mimic diagram, and 3mm plywood.  Looking the LED and switch mounts, I discovered that they would fit through something so thick and still have enough thread visible to attach the mounting nut.  Replacing the plywood with 1mm plasticard solved this problem.  The next step was to ensure that I could actually make 6mm diameter holes through the sandwich.  Some internet research suggested that a good way to drill through perspex without cracking or melting it is to use tile and glass drill bits.  Off I went to  Amazon to buy a set of bits .  I used some off-cuts to test the process.

Success! Now to drill 54 holes in perspex without cracking it.

Remarkably this worked as well.  By the end the bit seemed to be getting much less effective.  Either these bits are of poor quality or perspex takes its toll on them quickly.

I made up a frame from some spare 2"x0.5"ish timber that I had knocking around from an old bookcase and used this to mount the diagram sandwich.  My hope was that this would give enough space underneath to accommodate all the wiring.