The Design

The first step of this project was to select/create a design that fits a given shape of a diamond. Something that quickly came to my head was the diamond S that I used to draw as child. This was pretty difficult to design. I started with downloading the given diamond file, then set up a lot of construction lines for guidance, and then traced out the “S.” I decided to modify this “S” slightly to take up more the diamond given shape, this caused for slight asymmetry, but more of an aesthetic appearance.

Plasma Cutting:

                       

After having a completed file of the “S” (without construction lines), it was time to plasma cut! This was a bit difficult because it was unavailable for about 2 weeks. I got really lucky when I finally plasma cut my piece because it was right after the plasma cutter was cleaned (hence the blue clean liquid)!This was very satisfying to watch, and much nicer for fishing out my pieces after them being printed. Bellow are the pieces right after their cut filled with dross and rust.

           

Angle Grinding:

To get rid of the dross and rust, I decided to angle grind my S’s. This was one of my favorite steps of this project because I used to angle grind a lot when doing welding in high school. 

Sand Blasting:

After angle grinding, my pieces had a lot of lines form the grinder that were shiny, but not uniform. To have uniform, shiny finish, I sand blasted my S’s. There was a bit of difficulty when trying to reach the sharp edges of my S’s. Overall, they came out beautifully.

Spray Painting:

The “last” step was to spray paint my S’s. Because I loved how they looked after the sand blasting, I wanted to keep their metallic shine. I felt the best move was to add a clear coat to my pieces. This, unfortunately, came out terribly. My coats of clear spray paint were not even and it was very obvious. This led to me need to sand blast the clear coat off. Trying to sandblast the clear coat was not as successful as I would’ve liked but still recovered most of my Ss’ initial look. From here I discovered another spray paint, a metallic silver, and decided to give it a try. This was the best spray paint I could’ve used. It was very easy to apply! Bellow is the result of using the metallic spray paint!

Cost:

Time: 10$ x  10hrs: 100$

Material: $2.50

Post Processing (paint, sand blasting, angle grinding): $3+ $2.50 + $1

Total: $109