Best practices for cutting out plastic for custom housing?

[Jonathan Holt]

So I'm getting pretty close to finishing my second wii portable, and I'm currently putting the finishing touches on the cutouts in the housing for controller ports, memory card slots, etc in the housing.

I've seen pictures of housings other people have made where the cuts look clean and professional (for the controls, ports, etc), whereas I'm having to use tons of bondo to clean up my original cuts, which looked pretty terrible at first (I used a dremel for cutting out the holes).

Is there a better technique that will give you precise Cuts out of the housing so I won't have to do so much cleaning up to make them look nice?

 

[Aurelio]

Draw the outline of the shape that you want to cut and leave a margin of a couple of millimiters when using the dremel. Then clean the cut using a file and some sand paper until you reach the outline you draw before

 

[Jonathan Holt]

Thanks for the reply! I also bought a step drill bit, I saw someone use that to make holes for buttons,and it looked really clean. I've already made the controller ports before I got that bit, so they will look imperfect, but I'll be using that from now on.

 

[laingsoft]

Its one of those skills that you learn over time.

Cutting holes in cases is a pain in the ass. It's like body work on a car. Cut a little, sand, file, primer, fill, sand repeat

 

[Jonathan Holt]

Yeah, it hadn't been the funnest part for sure haha. Although after seeing how easy a circular hole is with a step bit, I felt dumb for the way I did it. I also didn't follow the Golden rule when cutting out the square for the memory card; instead of cutting small and sanding, I cut too big, and had to fill it in with bondo. This project has been a learning experience for sure.