Been wanting to complete this project all summer so my partner and I can enjoy it on our sailboat. As you can see the old instrument panel that is original to the boat was in rough shape and you could barely see the labels for the knobs which was not great…
I wanted to keep the same character of the boat so modelled the panel to be as close to original design as possible including recreating the manufacturer logo.
I used some spare plastic a friend gave me as I had only cut one fairly simple plastic piece before to do some test pieces. This was to both hone in the cut settings and to ensure my fit was correct.
Once all that was figured out I moved to cutting the final piece out using ColourCore plastic that is one colour on the inside sandwiched between to outside layers so when you engrave you get the lettering in another colour without any painting or whatnot. Worked really well but I had to spend a lot of time deburring and cleaning out the engravings to clean them up. Definitely could have dialed in the feeds and speeds more on that but had a hard time finding reliable information on how to approach this with plastic.
Also had an issue with M4 crashing on me between cuts which required a power reset that made accurate homing really hard and some of the cuts were misaligned. Luckily I was able to salvage the piece and mostly hide this one much is good as this material is not cheap!