April 23, 2006 on 2:25 pm | In Making | 1 Comment

Following on from Easter Weekend’s preparation, today I finished my Xbox 360 custom faceplate.

I’d previously printed out copies onto plain paper as a test of size:

and all was well, so I ordered some A4 Self Adhesive Inkjet-printable Vinyl, which arrived in the week.

A quick print out on “high quality, normal paper” settings gave me the cover. Then I had to carefully cut out and even more carefully remove the backing paper and apply it to the plain Xbox 360 Faceplate.

As I had hoped, the vinyl is stretchier than paper and happily copes with the curves of the faceplate. As there was a slight overlap at the edges I wrapped it around, which will help to stop it from peeling off over time.
Gir’s eye had to stretch to fit the “death star laser-stylee” power button, but the vinyl happily coped with that too – fantastic!

Around the drive bay I again simply wrapped the vinyl around and held it in place – once on the console it is kept in place by the DVD drive sticking through the faceplate anyway.

A fiddly part to clean up was around the IR port, I found a good technique was to take a sharp scalpel / craft knife and find the ridged edge of the port, and then carefully cut the vinyl out with the blade following the groove around the IR port. It seemed to work fairly well for me.

Lastly I needed to cut out the expansion port flap, so I turned the faceplate over and opened up the port, peeling it off from the vinyl. Then I cut out the vinyl using a scalpel (onto a cutting mat) using the port itself as a template. Fiddly but again not too bad.

Finally I powered up the 360 to check out Gir’s glowing eye. It worked – phew!

Next weekend I may have to pick up another blank faceplate and get to work on a Doctor Who design! Hee hee…

I want to thank the great Zim website Room with a Moose & GIR for providing the download of all the Zim artwork used in the faceplate – it was made so much easier by not having to do all the DVD screengrabs myself!