Making the Perfect Switch Panel in my Basement Workshop.

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]What's up, YouTube? This is my 1962 Mercury Comet that I converted to electric. I think everybody saw that video because oh, it did over half a million views. So, thank you for watching. But this here is a corroded piece of aluminum. And what we're going to do with this in today's video is we're going to replace this flimsy, crappy switch panel um with this much nicer pieces of aluminum here. I'll get it cleaned up.

[00:00:28]And when I'm finished with the switch pedal, we're going to finally address a very common observation that people have been giving me over and over again. By the end of this video, this car is going to be completely transformed.

[00:00:42]But first, let's actually get started on the switch panel. The first thing I need to know is what size to cut these holes for the switches. They look to be about half an inch, but there's a key slot on the bottom of them, and that'll help keep them vertical and align and keep them from rotating because anybody who's ever put a switch into a panel like this knows that it's impossible to get them just perfectly vertical, right? And they always want to start to rotate on you after a while. But the problem is standard drill bits tend to want to cut only circular holes. So, I'm going to have to come up with a different method for cutting these complex shapes.

[00:01:18]Usually for jobs like this, I like to use send cut sand, but I already have this perfect piece of high-grade aluminum that I want to use. It's actually a piece from the motor inverter that I fried by mistake in a previous video, and I think it would be cool to reuse it elsewhere in this project. But this rules out using any sort of online cutting or CNCing service.

[00:01:39]Therefore, there's really only one option left, and that is to get my own desktop water jet cutting machine and install it in my basement.

[00:01:47]>> [music] [music] >> Yeah.

[00:02:01][music] Yeah. Yeah. [music] If you've never heard of Wazer before, it's the world's [music] first compact benchtop water jet that lets you cut industrial-grade materials right from a standard home workshop. I'm not going to do a whole deep dive in this video, but if you wanted to get into CNC cutting at home, then this is a great way to get started. It can do high precision, very clean cuts through literally any material from aluminum and steel to glass, carbon fiber, and tile. Click on the link in the video description if you want to check it out. And full disclosure, Wazer sent me this machine so I could feature it in my videos and show you guys what I like about it. But they're not paying me for anything and I will give my honest opinion of it. I've been playing around with it for a few months now and so I'm ready to start cutting my own car parts. Now I know that this is just a demo, but of course I'm going to have to try and open a bottle with it.

[00:03:07]It's not a very There it goes.

[00:03:12]All right.

[00:03:15][music] The process first starts in software, and I'm using Adobe Illustrator to create the design for the switch panel.

[00:03:22]I'm not going to lie to you, it took me a little while to get up to speed working in Illustrator. [music] For the past 15 years, when I wanted to make something, I just grabbed the tools and I got to work. But now I'm going to have to make that switch in my brain to start with the computer instead. But by the time it took to finish this project to record this monologue you're hearing now, I had it sorted out. What really helped was starting one shape at a time and testing those pieces out on thin sheet metal to make sure everything was correct before cutting into the aluminum plate. And that's what you're seeing here. Starting with the holes for the switches and they have the key slots in them. And then working on the letters and the hole for the OLED screen.

[00:04:04]And here is my I think my final draft for the switch panel. I have the two gauges here, the three switches here, the LED display here, and this is for the hazard light switch. So I need to export it as a DXF is what I need. What I found is this works a lot better than using SVG. Everything just seems to work a lot better. Plays a lot nicer with the Wazer software.

[00:04:32]And then you go into [music] the Wazer software here, import the file, [music] and what you can do is run the simulation.

[00:04:51]So, I'll just show you that real fast.

[00:04:54]Um, what's important is that all these inner things are cut out before the big outer cut is made. So, I'm going to save it. Now, I'm going to choose a medium.

[00:05:11]And because it's this thin [music] sheet metal, it's only going to be 36 minutes long.

[00:05:17]We'll call it the switch panel test.

[00:05:20]>> [music] >> And there you go. Now I'm going to put it on my SD card and put it in the machine. This was a previous trial run, but I had a few settings wrong. I was cutting it from the inside instead of the outside and it screwed up these holes and it just is was the wrong setting. [music] So, I'm going to do that again. So, let's get this piece out of here. Let's get a new piece in. And also while that is doing that, I'm going to take the piece of aluminum here and I'm going to start cleaning it up and we're going to put it up here on this new drill press and I'm going to get a little fancy with it. You'll see.

[00:06:12]So, while that test piece was getting cut out, I took that chunk of aluminum over to my drill press, mounted it to this cross slide vice, and then was able to do this old hot rodding trick where you kind of add this scalloped effect by polishing circular bits at a time until it gives you that effect as you can see here in this video.

[00:06:34]However, at the time I didn't realize, but once I put the aluminum piece into the laser to have the switch panel cut out, the abrasive material was going to add like a sand blasting effect to the surface of the aluminum. So, that kind of ruins this effect, but it didn't really matter because there was other reasons why that was ruined. Many mistakes were made. This was just the first of many. All right, I have this all looking good, looking cool, and the test piece finished uh cutting out and everything fits perfectly. So, I think it's ready to go.

[00:07:09][music] [music] Heat. [music] [music] Heat.

[00:07:41][music] >> [music] [music] >> Okay, it's as ready as it'll ever be.

[00:08:10]This job's going to take over 3 hours.

[00:08:34]We already have one little mistake. Um, that one didn't get cut out all the way because I got enough water up in here to uh cause a little bit of a clog. And when I turned it back on, no abrasive was getting through. And I knew something was wrong.

[00:08:50]And I was able to pause it and then fix it. But I'll have to figure out how to correct this little mistake. So, I'm going to continue now. Oh, and for whatever reason, the R didn't finish.

[00:09:05]Didn't quite get all the way cut.

[00:09:25]What the [ __ ] When I have a much bigger problem, the whole machine just shut off.

[00:09:32]Um, I have power.

[00:09:35]The little [ __ ] thing just turned off right in the middle of the cut. That's a big problem.

[00:09:43]Oh no. You got to be kidding me. I did not push this thing.

[00:09:48]Okay, it appears somehow this button got triggered. That is the safety shut off switch.

[00:09:56]I didn't touch it though. So I have no choice now but to start over. It was 25% done of a almost three-hour long almost four-hour long cut and there's already one or two mistakes anyways. So, I'm going to start over.

[00:10:11]I'm going to have to cut it out of this side, which I didn't even polish.

[00:10:15][snorts] Okay, it's a tight fit, but I think it was just enough material.

[00:10:22]Let's check the extents.

[00:10:29]Pretty close to that hole.

[00:10:33]All right, let's give it a go.

[00:10:55]Okay, I've learned my lesson now. Don't open it. Don't pause it in the middle of the run and then spray everything with water to clean it off. Just let it do its thing until it needs you to fill refill the hopper. All right, now let's get out of the basement. Let's go back up to the garage cuz I want to show you what the hell I was talking about earlier in the video. I was alluding to something.

[00:11:18]Yeah. Yeah. We're going to turn the car into a Ghostbusters Ectomobile because tomorrow is an art car party and then Saturday is the art car parade. All right. So, while that part is cutting down there in the basement, I'm just going to throw a couple props up on here and we're going to have a little bit of fun and transform this car.

[00:11:40][music] [music] Time and time again, people said this car looked like the one in the Ghostbusters movies. So last year, I wanted to turn it into the Ectomobile for an art car parade, but I didn't have the car [music] working in time for the event, and I ended up using my backup wagon in 1980 Mercedes. [music] So for this year's parade, I'm just taking the props I've already built, and I'm adding them to the Mercury Comet, [music] finally fulfilling its destiny as the EV Ecto1.

[00:12:12][music] >> [music] >> It just stopped again.

[00:12:28]Just nothing on here like it's off. And it's this time it's full of water. This time I knew why the machine shut off. It was because the water level got so high that it tripped the switch for the high water level. And what I learned was that I have to clean the filters from time to time. This is the first time I had to clean the filters. And what I also learned was that when the machine stops in the middle of a cut, what I can do is go to the design file, delete what's already been cut, export that file again, open it up in the Wazer software, and then set the offsets to exactly what they were when the cut started. Then when you have the material already fastened to the cut bed, you don't have to move it and it'll pick up exactly where it left off.

[00:13:13]All right. Now, I'm going to load that modded file. And we're going to make sure that the cutting head starts in the exact spot that it should, which is that corner right there.

[00:13:24]And here it goes. [music] [music] All right. Good. Good. Good. Okay. I think it's all ready.

[00:13:36]All right. [music] All ready.

[00:13:45]>> [music] >> Okay, this time I'm going to keep a much closer eye on the water level and the used abrasive collection. [music] I'm I'm learning. It's another tool. You got to learn how to use it.

[00:14:02][music] It's on the final cut now and it's really chugging along. It likes [music] to do long cuts a lot more than it likes to do lots of short cuts that involve lots of piercings.

[00:14:22]So, um, any minute [music] now it'll be done. So, while that's happening and finishing up, I'm going to finish up up here in the garage [music] the Ghostbusters car transformation. No, not this one. This was last year's Ghostbusters car. My backup wagon.

[00:14:40][music] This is the wagon for this year.

[00:14:46][music] [music] [music] [music] There it is. All done. It just finished up.

[00:15:08]It took hours and hours. It had to get through a lot of different little problems.

[00:15:28]Well, I didn't mean to leave a tab, but um somehow a tab snuck in there.

[00:15:33]So, I'll have to break this loose.

[00:15:38]There we go.

[00:15:41]And now what happened with this one, there's also a tab here, but it's a bit more than a tab. What happened was as I was cutting this circle, the abrasive stopped flowing. And I realized the problem right away cuz it gets really loud when that happens. So, I'll have to do a little bit of work to get this circle out.

[00:15:58]Yeah. [laughter] That's so cool, though. It's cut out of the It's cut out of the cover for the inverter for the Nissan Leaf, the one that I broke.

[00:16:14]>> Oh, thank you.

[00:16:17]>> I had the switch panel cut out finally, but it needed some work before I could install it, and I just didn't have the time to get to that before the ARC car parade. Regardless, my 4-year-old son and I had an absolute blast, and it's a memory we'll never forget.

[00:16:32]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Victory [music] back.

[00:16:55][music] >> [music] [music] >> Back home now and in the basement workshop. I could finish up the switch panel. I had to remove some of the aluminum castings from the backside so that the switches could fit. And I found that a carbide cutting wheel on a Dremel worked best, but it still took me an hour or two. Then I could start polishing the surface using the same method as before, and it worked really well.

[00:17:45][music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Finally, I drilled a few holes for some mounting brackets. Of course, I cut the mounting brackets out using the Wazer.

[00:18:14]With that, the switch panel was done and I could begin installing it into the car.

[00:18:19][music] [music] [music] [music] Heat. Heat.

[00:18:43][music] [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat.

[00:19:20][music] >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat.

[00:19:42][music] >> [music] [music] >> Okay, I have the wiring done. It's time to turn this on now and check it out.

[00:20:15]That is exactly what I wanted to see.

[00:20:18]Um, it looks like it's working perfectly. I got the warm glow gauges from Speed Hut. These were some pretty expensive gauges. Unfortunately, they're not sponsoring this video, so I just had to buy them. But I really like how they move around when you start it up because when you start this car on, you don't actually hear the engine turning on.

[00:20:36]There is no noise whatsoever. So, I wanted another sensory cue that the car has turned on and that's why I got these gauges and you have reverse, neutral, and drive. Let's talk about what's going on with this R for a moment because um yeah, it's incomplete.

[00:20:59]Well, I don't know why that happened. I don't know if it was a problem with my design or or something else, but it was doing that in all my tests as well.

[00:21:10]Um, just kind of some just kind of an unfortunate quirk about this, but it's still definitely an R. I didn't get this wired up yet for the hazards, but I did wire up the horn.

[00:21:24]That's right. I wired the horn to the old column shifter for the three on the tree.

[00:21:30]And that was kind of a fun little thing.

[00:21:33]Let me show you that.

[00:21:41]I have this uh this is a brake light switch for a motorcycle.

[00:21:46]And down there is the you can't really see it, but the linkage is down there from the shifter.

[00:21:53]And yeah, that's how that works. I'm also going to finish wiring up the horn to this as well. I just wanted to have a purpose for the column shifter still.

[00:22:06]All right, thank you for watching. This was a lot of fun. The project worked out really well and I had a blast doing the Ghostbuster stuff. I'll get another video out there soon. Um, so subscribe if you haven't already and give it a thumbs up and see you in the next one.

[00:22:19][music] >> [music] [music] [music]