og2 Front Panel Construction

The panel design and text was done in Adobe Illustrator. The background image is a picture I took of Lake Tahoe with a digital camera. I loaded it into Adobe Photoshop, enlarged it, cropped the height, and mirrored some on the left to get the width I needed. Then I imported the Illustrator panel design, and created the og2 logo. I divided the whole thing into four separate sections, and saved them as separate jpg's (300dpi). These separate sections were then printed onto Avery full sheet labels with a color inkjetprinter.

The front panel material is .06" aluminum, available from www.radioshack.com for a very reasonable price ($20 for a 4 foot by 2 foot plate!). Although I have found that .06" is plenty thick for individual modules, the 31" x 11" og2 panel needed reinforcement, which I did with 1/2" aluminum angle bars running the width of the panel on the top and bottom. This made it plenty stiff with no bowing.

I printed plain paper copies of the panel sections, trimmed them to size, and taped them onto the front of the aluminum, and center punched the location of all the holes, then drilled them all with a 1/8" bit. Each hole was then drilled to size with a step drill bit, and deburred with a file. The drilling was pretty tedious!

Next I very carefully trimmed the Avery labels. Before taking the backing off, I arranged all the label sections over the holes (with a light shining through the back) to see how they would line up, and making pencil marks on the aluminum. Next the tricky part: takingoff the backing and laying the labels down, again with a backlight shining through for alignment. I used a wallpaper roller to ensure good contact with the panel.

For protection, I laid clear contact vinyl over the whole thing, rolled it down with the wallpaper roller, then cut out all the holes with the Xacto knife. I used blue enamel paint to touch up where the aluminum shows through.

The end result, although not perfect (you can see the seams between the labels, and the alignment is a bit off in places because my original drill templates were), looks pretty nice.

In retrospect, I would have taken more care aligning the original drill templates. In fact, alignment was the only real difficulty I had. On smaller size modules the Avery label method with contact paper should work very well.