n-filter

Earlier, I had marked where the round N-filter would go on my proton pack.

My first thought was to cut open the Fiberglass shell and insert the N-Filter inside, but for some reason, I decided to go down another path.

My thick, aluminium N-filter had to be ut to match the profile of my proton pack!

This is definitely a scary prospect as I don’t have a proper metal workshop, and a failed result would be harder to patch up. Never the less, time to get cutting.

I started by making a paper profile by wrapping around the N-Filter and slid it off and cut where I had to cut the metal. Once I was happy with a good starting point, I taped this down firmly onto the N-Filter and made a few futile attempts to cut the thick metal with a small metal blade. I quickly decided that using my dremel was the way to go!

The corners were done by drilling down with a step drill until I got close enough, and then filing down with a sharp file until I reached my cut outs.

I cut sparingly, making sure I had plenty of material left that needed filing and sanding down to make a perfect fit.

Just to give you an idea of how thick the material is, check this out:

Once the base cuts were made, I spent quite a lot of time by filing and testing, testing and filing. Repeat ad infinitum, it seemed. I made up a simple basic program to describe the process better:

10 sand and file
20 test fit
30 goto 10

After a while, I came up with this:

The more alert eyes see that the cut-out is not perfectly straight, but that was the result of test fitting, as the fiber glass proton pack is not 100% straight at times.

It did, however fit quite well:

The last step is of course to paint this and insert the mesh inside and finally bondo it to the fiberblass surface. I will need to drill a hole in the fiberglass shell where this sits at some point, in order to add smoke coming out of the filter, but that is another exercise for another day.