The New Control Panel
I'm embarrassed to admit that this is the fourth control panel I've made for the Z Scale Gorre & Daphetid. The reason for the first three iterations, which were all of the same functional design, was cosmetic. The panel consists of a one-eighth inch thick slab of styrene to which I adhered the graphic, which was printed on photo paper and laminated with 10 mil material. The problem I faced was that the lamination would fail wherever there was black ink, and when I cut or drilled the material, the clear layer would separate, creating grey halos around the switches that spread over time.
By contrast, Panel Number Four came about owing to a major blunder on my part as I was working on the old mill. The replacement water wheel motor was mad noisy; being electrically part of the illumination circuit, however, it would run whenever the lights were on. Since I have a "thing" about noise as it is, I felt it would be prudent to separate the water wheel from the lights. But this meant adding a new switch—which meant making a new control panel.
Since I had to change the artwork, I decided this time around to make further graphic adjustments to deal with the de-lamination issue by rendering white circles around all of the switch openings.