Reviving this thread to get some advice regarding drilling the speaker holes on repro kick panels.
Regardless of which side I drill the holes from, or where I place my template, I can’t seem to get a clean flush with surface hole when drilling into the plastic. Looking at my picture, the first few holes of rows that are flush I have gone over with a toothpick and depressed the excess plastic to the back of the hole. This takes forever!
Royce will have good advice on this, to me it looks like your drill bit is getting hot and melting the plastic instead of drilling it. You might try using a new bit and a slow speed on your drill motor.
I was using a quality new dewalt bit, and tried both low and high speeds. It doesn’t seem to be as much heat related excess as it is the bit not being able to properly shave off the excess.
I tried a razor blade, but it simply pushes the excess over the hole. I thought others here may have been using a special acrylic or plastics bit they had more success with?
When building quench rings from copper the holes would look like that.
I used a tiny countersink and deburred each hole by hand.
Turned out good but took a while.
Royce, you might be right, could be different plastics. There seem to be a few companies out there that reproduce these.
Countersink might work, maybe I’ll try out a tile bit with the wide head and see if that does a better job.
On another note, this is tempting me to create a mold for a simple aluminum needle template that can just be heated and pushed through these kick panels. Curious if that would even work.
Put your panel in the freezer for a while before drilling and see how it goes. Plastics machining is always a bit tricky, but freezing them helps limit the plastic deformation (forming burrs) and encourage cutting.
I used my dremell with a small cut off wheel to trim them at the base to eliminate all the pointy plastic sticking up as I believe it will provide better sound with out then there. No one would ever know the difference but I would if my speaker sound is better. It was pretty tedious careful cutting but worked great.
Holy thread revival! I’ve just been contemplating stereo options and it brought me back around to thinking about this kick panel issue. Wondering if there is any news from Bill or others who were working on a solution.
