Helicopter Vents

[Steve_D]

I believe the hole needs to be 82mm.
How did you make the hole?
Steve

[bluesatin]

I would suggest a 82mm hole cutter.

[davefiddes]

I used a 79mm holesaw then enlarged slowly to 82mm with wet&dry wrapped round a flowerpot (hey it was conical - or should that be comical?). It produced a great finish and the hole was round but took ages.

If I were doing it again I'd probably just use an 83 mm standard hole saw. After I tried my 79mm hole saw on a test piece of acrylic I discovered that it produced a slightly undersize hole.

When it comes to painting the border round the acrylic make sure you remove the masking tape fairly quickly. I discovered the hard way that if you get tiny amounts of bleeding round the tape when you remove the tape a week later (had to go to work ) it will invariably lift the thin anti-UV/scratch laquer that coats the surface of the plastic. This doesn't look too bad to start with but once its started to lift....it just wont stop!

I used black Tamiya model car body paint (as suggested by BobM) and it did a very neat job on set of windows #2.

[USCANAM]

This was a standard off the shelf cutter.
http://home.comcast.net/~rosenracing5/wsb/html/view.cgi-photo.html--SiteID-815281.html
Jack

[davefiddes]

That looks like a Starrett hole saw? They claim only to make 79 or 83mm saws...

Edited to say: 3 1/4" hole saw is 82.55mm which would be about perfect...

>> Edited by davefiddes on Tuesday 10th February 23:25

[Patriq]

Has anyone tried the small opening windows from a soaring plane ? I'm learning to fly at the moment, and it hit me when I saw them, that this might work in an Ultima.

Might enable you to hand out some money, say at a Road toll.

[bobm]

I used my Black and Decker Dremel-alike Steve. First used a cutting bit to cut an undersized hole then used the sanding drum to open it out. Ended up with a really nice finish.

[davefiddes]

Problem I see with bigger vents is that the fittings would start to take up some of the view and would look ugly.

[mhussa]

The Ultima used for the USA coast to coast trip on the ultimasports website has 2 vents on each door (I didn't notice them before).

www.ultimasports.co.uk/gtr/pics/usa22.jpg