For our assignment to plasma cut something, we decided to replicate a CNC moose, but on a somewhat simpler scale. We did take the antlers from a design on thingiverse, but the rest of the moose (3 bodies and 2 legs) we designed ourselves using AutoCAD. This was intended to be cut on a 1/8″ thick sheet of aluminum, so that’s how we decided what notches to make so the pieces could fit together.

 

Through a series of complications with using the plasma cutter, transferring an AutoCAD DXF file to TorchMate, incompatible TorchMate versions, and other things, we finally managed to cut the moose. This is the antler piece we cut out first (it’s a larger size than our final product) before it was post processed. There was a bunch of slag on the edge as you can see. Later on, the head of the torch on the plasma cutter was replaced and so the rest of our pieces didn’t have this much slag on them.

    

These are the rest of the pieces after post processing. The sides were buffed and the edges were filed down so they were smoother. The legs were bent so that the moose would look cooler when it was standing.

Because of the method we used to finally get our DXF file to show up with closed shapes on TorchMate, the offset was a little off, so the notches were too wide and we just epoxied together the pieces. This is our final product.