Just curious - what's the port material on your housing? Poly? or Plex? I'd appreciate a link or mfr's part # if possible. And how do you cut it so nicely?
The end plates are made from 1 inch acrylic. I buy it from different places but you can buy it on EBay.
I have and use a milling machine with a 10 inch rotary table to cut the circles. Before I bought my lathe and milling machine I used a templet and a router fixed to the bottom of a horizontal table. The router does not have to be mounted to a table but I prefer this over hand holding the router.
You first determine the circles diameter and copy it to a 3/4 inch piece of plywood. You than carefully cut the circle out using a jigsaw or a bandsaw. Sand the templet smooth by hand or palm sander. Mount this wood templet to your acrylic using double side foam tape, 3M makes a very nice double sided tape that’s about 1/4 inch thick and can be purchased in most hardware stores. Than cut off the excess acrylic very close to the wood templet with your jigsaw or bandsaw. Now you can flush cut the acrylic using a flush cutting router bit or laminate bit. The bearing on the router bit will ride on the wood templet and cut the exact shape as the templet.
You now have a usable end plate.
I prefer to sand out the ends and polish them for a finished look. You can start off with 180 and work up to 400 or 600 before you polish the ends on a buffing machine. A buffing machine is the same as a bench grinder that can run at a slower speed, around 1800 to 2400 RPM.. You’ll also need two buffing wheels, one for the compound and one wheel for the final polish with out adding compound to it. If you have never polished acrylic before I would suggest practicing on a scrap piece of material, it's very easy to burn the edges if you apply to much pressure.
Marc
