Drilling a hole in the A1.
 

Anyone drilled a hole for the headphone jack in the cap, if so how did it go?
Cheers.

I think you might have a problem drilling a hole through rubber as it is not a hard stable product and I think that the drill bit will distort the rubber all over the place whilst trying to drill it ending up either ripping the flap or having a hole that is just a complete mess. There is possibly one way and that would be to clamp the rubber flap between two pieces of wood to restrict the rubber moving all over the place personally I would not risk it.

Alan

I did the drilling job ;-) descriptions and foto can be found here:


http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=82943

Nice job jan I would have thought you would have had problems with the rubber seems I thought wrong.

Alan

Well, I actually HAD problems, that's why I glued that gasket on the hole.
At the end of the day the whole work was a little bit in vain, because I got accustomed to leave the rubberplate open most of time. You actually have to, when you stay on a tripod and use a remote control. Of course one could also drill a second hole. Or cut off the whole thing :-)

Thanks for all the tips, especially Jan for the headphone extension cable and Chris for the bracket.

I work around airfields and I need to keep the dirt out of the cam even to taping up the XLR plugs when not in use.
Cheers.

Try a single hole paper punch. It works on most thin plastic.

(you can practice punching holes by using the clear top of a 25 or 50 DVDR pak)

Oh.....oh dear.

I just loosened the phillips head screws around the around the rubber piece that covers all the ports and removed it intact because I needed to use phones + LANC and didn't want to cover dangling about.

I punched a hole with a paper puncher and then widened it with a round file that I heated in a gas flame. Works perfectly. Did the same for the LANC-contact.

I had to drill/make a hole (1/4inch) in a rubber housing on an alarm system, I found drilling was useless especially if you want 'neat'. What I did find was that a hole cutter that a shoe/boot repairer uses did the job because it cuts the hole out rather like a pastry cutter.

Another option is to use a smallish soldering iron and just 'melt' the hole through the rubber.

I do this in webbing straps (which seem to be some sort of soft polyethylene weave) when I want to put in holes for mounting bolts.