For this week’s assignment I was charged with understanding how to operate a plasma cutter and demonstrate my understanding of the plasma cutter by creating two metal diamond shapes with a creative design of our choice. My design choice for this project was a turtle. Overall, throughout this project I was able to understand how a plasma cutter operates and how it can be utilized. 

PROCESS:

To begin this project, we were provided with a vector file of a diamond that would act as our dimensional constraint for this project. Utilizing Adobe Illustrator I added a turtle design into the diamond shape and vectorized the entire design as one shape. Afterwards I imported the vector file into the plasma cutter desktop and plasma cut my design from a sheet of steel. For this assignment we had to produce two deliverables but as it was going to be my first time utilizing a plasma cutter I decided to cut out three shapes so that I had room for error when post processing the shapes. 

 

The images above are the plasma cutter cutting out my diamond with my turtle design.

 

Upon the design being cut out there was a lot of dross on the turtle cut diamond so I proceeded to remove the dross with an angle grinder. 

 

An image of the diamond and what the dross looks like on it before angle grinding.

The turtle diamonds after the dross is removed.

 

Upon angle grinding my shape was dross free, however the edges of the shape were still sharp. So to smoothen out the edges and corners of my diamonds, I proceeded to use metal files to sand down the sharpness of the exterior angle and corners as well as sand down any sharp edges on the interior turtle design. 

 

I used the small file within the image on the interior of the turtle while using the bigger file on the outer edges and the corners. 

 

Then I proceeded to sandblast my diamonds to even out the surface of the shape as well as prep it so the spray paint would adhere more firmly to the surface. 

 

The sandblasting made the diamonds lose their luster however the surface did became level.

 

After sandblasting was complete I proceeded to spray paint my diamonds. As my design choice was turtle themed I aim to continue that theme with my choice of spray paint. I attempted to recreate an ocean spray design by spraying a light blue background with white spots speckled throughout.

 

 

Overall I am really happy with how the final product turned out, however I believe I could have been better in my spray painting technique as certain parts of my diamond have more paint compared to the rest of it. Below is a cost breakdown of this project. The total cost according to the cost breakdown is $396.88. A majority of the cost is due to labor and design costs. However I believe the cost of producing one diamond would be significantly decreased as I ended up producing three diamonds. 

 

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	0.19 in Thick, 6 in x 10 in steel sheet	$28.31	https://www.grainger.com	1	$28.31
	Metal file set	$19.00	https://www.amazon.com/	1	$19.00
Labor	Prototyping Engineer (You!)	$36.48/hr	https://www.ziprecruiter.com/	6/hr	$218.88
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	$50/month	https://apps.txrxlabs.org/join-us/	1	$50.00
	Software Cost (Adobe Illustrator)	$19.99/month (1st year student price)	https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud	1	$19.99
Design	Engineering and Development	$60.70/hr	https://www.talent.com/	1	$60.70

Below is my workspace after I was finished and what one of my finished diamonds look like.