Gadgetory

you may have seen that something we've featured recently on the channel is this light up dock right here from PDP which i think is an awesome accessory for just doing something a little different with your Nintendo switch setup because the regular dock is well kind of boring and this does a lot more interesting things for it and while it comes with two different little sheets like this four designs down on the front I started thinking how cool would it be to actually have more options that you could switch between more often and really how hard would it be to do on our own which we kind of learned was actually harder than we thought it would look let's just let's just show you what would happen so we're taking a look at these inserts and what actually they're made out of there's really only two things we have to worry about the artwork itself which we'll get to later and more importantly right now the plastic sheet that it's based on now you're not exactly gonna find something shaped exactly like this so you have to do a little home improvement job so first off we got clear acrylic sheets like this now you can find these at pretty much any home improvement store you can also grab them online and this is the small size we could find so we do have to cut it down this is an 8 by 10 inch sheet what's more important though is the thickness because you can't really as easily defend yourself so this is a point oh eight inch thick one or in the more logical metric system it's two millimeters so that's the size you want to get to match these inserts and we're gonna do our best to kind of cut out and shape this to match the design that PDP did now if you're wondering why this piece of acrylic is so much he's you're looking than the PDP one that's because when you buy these it actually has this little protective film layer on it that way when you're doing stuff like we are where you're cutting it you're going to accidentally make all kinds of Nicks and stuff in the plastic as a result of that though it's also really hard to do things like actually pencil in where you want to cut stuff so instead when you want to make markings we actually took the PDP sheet itself and used it as a stencil where we grabbed a box cutter and cut lines all around to get the size that we wanted now something worth noting here is that we did choose to cut on the higher parts and leave the bottom intact to be the base for it because it's really important for these sheets at the bottom is perfectly straight well we're gonna do our best job to make a straight cut otherwise this is just gonna make our job a lot easier because needs to rest right on the bottom of that dock now once we've done the kind of drawing with the box cutter the next step is to actually cut it now there's a whole bunch of tutorials you can find online for how to cut plastic sheets like this and one of the idea is that we initially thought would be a good to go for us was using a dremel tool because well we have one on hand and while that did work it did have the problem making it a lot harder to make sure we had a perfectly straight cut so instead we decided to go maybe a little overboard and upgraded to a chop saw real quick by the way this probably should go without saying but kids don't try this at home and adults please use proper safety wear and wear gloves and some kind of eye protection so once we were done cutting out the main pieces the next step we had to do actually ended up being probably the most difficult part of this whole idea and that was getting the notches down below so that this could sit inside that talks little base area where the lights shoot up and we had a couple of these had to do this and well a lot of they're just difficult that way we thought we would first off we got a sanding diamond wheel point tip to use on the dremel tool which we thought we just kind of let us like lightly sand it down and get that kind of curve going just right and instead all that ended up doing was melting the plastic around the tip and basically just completely ruined it so clearly that didn't work so the next idea was to do something similar to how we did the initial cut out which was to use a box cutter to just kind of cut a little groove area that we wanted out and then use scissors to cut that portion off but that didn't work because of the high tension on the acrylic sheet so what happened was when we use the scissors it just caused these massive cracks to form and well obviously we can't use this because it's just got an awful little final version is that this point that we realized we didn't really need to perfectly match whatever it is PDP Dib you didn't have to have these tiny perfect exact notches as long as we had enough plastic per to sit on the base it was gonna be fine even if we had to cut a little deeper in so instead of using scissors or any kind other tools we just used the regular saw tool on the Dremel to cut out the area we needed which will led to a much smoother cut without causing any kind of major fractures in the plastic now while all this cutting so far has gotten us the rough shape that we needed obviously it's not exactly looking great just yet that's what we need to take a sanding tool for the dremel tool to actually smooth out all the edges and everything to make sure that it's actually a nice good-looking piece of plastic you wanna display and now those jagged piece of stuff that we just cut out of a sheet so now that we have our base piece of plastic the next step is to do the artwork now we don't know 100% for sure how PDP did this our best guess is that use silk-screening which basically employs a very thin layer of paint so instead for our group which is gonna be a little simpler is we just picked up vinyl stickers there are a ton of these things on the internet mostly for cars sometimes for like mac books and laptops and that kind of thing but they're really easy to set up and apply all you got to do is take off the base piece there gonna be a clear bit of plastic along with the white part you put that on when you're doing take off the clear plastic and all that's gonna remain is the white cutout so we thought cool we can pick up a variety of these different stickers to do different designs on hand and maybe down the road try something a little more custom but after we applied a sticker we discovered a bit of a problem so at first glance after we apply these stickers we think hey this actually doesn't look too bad but once we actually turn the dock on with them in we realized well probably didn't really anticipate you see the stickers that have a lot of surface area it's very easy for those to get air bubbles which you don't notice at all when the stickers just applied to something but when you have a light running through it well now you're starting to see all these holes and things in place that make it look well just not good from far away it can kind of be pulled off sometimes but up close you really start to notice problems with this design now if you're really careful you can use a thicker sticker and get away with it like this one we did right here with a Sonic and Tails design we were a lot more careful on this one and as a result you don't have as many air bubbles but there is another problem that comes up with this where when you have this much surface area the light doesn't pierce through as well so while this design does work and it doesn't look half bad you're definitely not getting the same sense of color that you do with some of the other ones so in general might be better go with designs like this Nintendo one where you're gonna have much thinner stickers to work with so more lights gonna pierce through and you have to worry about those air bubbles so what have we learned well it is totally possible to do something like this I mean it's gonna take a lot of time investment you're rolling it to buy a lot of plastic sheets to go through different run throughs of cutting them down and you're gonna need to have the right tools on hand but if you have all this stuff and a bit of a knack for you know do-it-yourself kind of crafting stuff this is something you could do though honestly based on our first-hand experience it's probably better left to professionals