Post-processing does not take 50% of the entire project! It takes 99%! I have been spending at least 5-7 hours per day at OEDK in the past several days. We really should change the name of this assignment to “post-processing a metal piece” instead of “plasma cutting”. But anyway, there are still a lot to talk about plasma cutting.

Plasma cutter is a really “stupid” machine. The Torchmate software, for instance, caused me quite some problems. After first designing my piece on Adobe Illustrator, I was very excited about the outcome of the plasma cutting. This was my original file (figure 1)

Figure 1. original design

What I was trying to make is a 3-D piece with the “yin” & “yang” joining together in mid-air by bending the two stripes of steal. I was also trying to create a spiky effect by bending up the margins into different angles. This is a test version which is still a failure even though the file was simplified.(figure 2)

Figure 2. one of the test pieces. This was what I naively imagined.

However, the plasma cutter just kept throwing tempter at me. It DOES NOT WANT TO CUT A COMPLICATED PIECE! At first, I tried to apply male path directly on my original design. And the dxf. file looked like a crime scene. The male path tool “cleverly” connects end points and make enclosed shapes to cut. So it tried to connect all the single cuts in my file. So I tried the “online path”. It looked awesomely nice on Torchmate. However, it gives me this.

Figure 3. I don’t know what expression I should have

And thisFigure 4. irregular and hopeless edges
Figure 5. all 4 filed test pieces. Though I’ve already simplified my file, adjusted the space between cuts, some of the cuts were still too close to each other that the plasma melted the metal in between

And this happened

starting at 36s, it cut an entire piece off that it shouldn’t have. Thus it detected that it was not cutting any metal and so it started to play by itself:

Just kept repeating cutting at the same spot.

So I simplified my file down to this:

Figure 6. simplified file that still did not work well.

And finally, this:

Figure 7. What a disappointment

So I placed my hope on the post-processing.

1. sanding material
2. plasma cutting
3. angle & surface grinding
4. filing the edges
5. sanding the surface .
(4＆5*ｎ)
6. washing the surface

7.1 sand-blasted “yin”     7.2 UV-protection coated “yang”
8.Glow painted “yin” and “yang”

9. black and white paint
(sand and painted again)
10.Glaze coating
11. bend the material to make 3-D object

It was a fun time with the coatings 🙂 Layer by Layer, again and again, travelling back and forth from Wiess to OEDK….

The initial process went pretty well.

         

Figure 8~11. taping and glowing ! (10. one part sand blasted, and the other UV-protection coated)

I covered the entire piece with paper-tape, individually processed “yin” and “yang”, and glow painted them. The glow paint looked pretty nice in the dark, it is just so hard to capture the gloom with a cell phone. A really funny thing almost happened. I was so close to apply a UV-protection coat above glowing paint , and suddenly I realized that if the coat seals off UV light, the glowing paint wouldn’t work, LoL.

The paints gave me a really hard time. The first thing was to make a shade. I chose cardboard initially and thought it would be easy to make varied shapes on cardboard, but I was wrong. Even though I chose one of the thinnest piece of cardboard, it was not possible to make a perfect curved cut. The edges made by carving knives were always furry, and it made very ugly  patterns when I tried to paint them.

Figure 11. cardboard shade

Figure 12. all the tools I used for a single cardboard piece. We really should have knives like mine, the one on the left. You can sharpen the blade just by breaking the blunt tip piece off.

Figure 13. Why don’t we have double-sided tape?! I had to customize my own

 Figure 14. doing two metal pieces with the same cardboard piece, saved me the time of making another shade.

Figure 15. Because the cardboard could not perfectly cover the metal piece, wired patterns were created.

So I had to try to repaint the pieces above the original paint. It just took so long to dry.

One of the piece went wrong in the every possible way. Dust flew got stuck to the piece–repaint; someone rested a cardboard on it when it was still not dried-repaint; tried to apply a glaze coating, however, the glaze dissolved the paint beneath it–repaint; accidentally applied too much gray antique paint–repaint;.etc…… I should have used a laser cut shade from the very beginning! It worked perfectly well for later processing.

And finally!!!

  Figure 16 & 17. Final products!

Regarding how to document my process, Dr. Wettergreen enlightened me, suggesting I could use URL as I have to little space on my piece for me to out down all the steps. And I thought of using a QR code. Fortunately, there are several online QR code generator. I tried laser etching the QR code, but the contrast is too low for the cell phone to detect. Thus, I just printed it on a piece of paper and stuck it on the back of my pieces.

The Glaze coating is still drying, I just hope nothing would happen to my metal pieces again.

P.S Thank Nicolas so much for lending me his paints !