This week was especially interesting to me, and also completely new.  I had never been inside the machine shop before, so learning how to operate one of the machines in there (the plasma cutter) and then actually becoming semi-self-sufficient with it was a really cool process.  It turns out that the plasma cutter is extremely similar to the laser cutter, at least in the way it is setup.  Here’s the machine in action!

I cut out an outline of Texas.  When the plasma cutter was done, the Texas piece was really rugged looking.  The surfaces had a couple streaks of discoloration and the edges were super rough, and in some places pretty sharp.  So I did what any other ENGI 210 student would do and headed over to the tool table to play with the tools.  I learned that the big files at the table are excellent at filing down the edges of pieces of metal.

After only about an hour of filing I got the edges to actually feel smooth.  This was a really eye opening experience for me.  Before this project I had always thought of metal as being a generic, really really hard substance – something completely different from other materials such as plastic or wood.  It was weird for me to alter the physical appearance of the metal using hand tools (and even sandpaper for a short while!).  Now, metal almost seems like just an exceptionally hard form of wood that can still be molded.

I didn’t want to spray paint my Texas, but I did want to alter the surfaces at least a little.  Somehow this came up in a conversation I was having with Carlos and he mentioned a sand blaster/polisher that is in the woodshop.  I asked Danny to let us use the machine, and I’m really happy with the way it made the metal look.  It gave it an opaque look and something like a grainy texture.  The top right of this picture is what sand blasting metal looks like:

As you may or may not be able to tell, the majority of the metal is shinier than the rest of the metal.  This is because I tried polishing it after sand blasting it and took a picture to see whether I was making a noticeable difference.   To polish it I cut out circles of 600 grit sandpaper and put them on the end of a Dremel, then basically sanded down the surface.  It was a long process, and after a certain point it seemed like the metal wasn’t getting any shinier so I stopped.  In class on Thursday Dr. Wettergreen mentioned that he had a vinyl cutter conveniently placed in his office downstairs, and suggested I cut out my name so that I could re- sandblast or spray paint the metal.  That would give me a really cool contrast when I took the vinyl off afterwards!

Design creds definitely go to Dr. Wettergreen for this one, I totally would not have thought to ask if anyone had a vinyl cutter I could use!  Here is what my final product looks like.

Once again, I really enjoyed working on this week’s project.  I spent a lot of time in the OEDK outside of class time, but it was all time I enjoyed.  I found myself accidentally working past midnight on Thursday trying to polish the surface until I realized I wasn’t getting any farther and that I needed sleep.