I thought this was a pretty straight forward assignment. No brainstorming necessary! Just cut a nice picture of your state and do stuff to make it look pretty. Which was good because I went through like five or six drafts of modifying my mid-term project this week.

I hail from the Bluegrass State of Kentucky, which admittedly is a rather random place to be from, or so I’ve been told. This week’s assignment of plasma cutting your home state introduced us to the plasma cutter, which I felt like was just a slightly more complicated version version of laser cutting with a slightly worse interface.

The process itself was pretty self explanatory thanks to the instruction packet everyone got. The one thing that surprised me was how open the plasma cutter was. There was no hood or anything and when we first started cutting, the sparks totally surprised me as a couple flew out and landed near my arms as I let out a small shriek.

After finishing the cut I began to clean up the piece. I used a file to smooth out the edges and tried to do the same for the surface before realizing how tedious that would be. Thankfully we learned sandblasting in class and that solved that. Sandblasting gave it a nice and smooth white surface, not to mention it was tons of fun.

Afterwards I had to paint it. For some reason the only paints I could find then was black or fluorescent, and I felt that black would look better as time goes on.

I gave a quick sanding with some 400 grit sandpaper, then the only thing left is to give it a nice finishing coat. I decided to spray a clear coat to achieve the final result. I’m not sure if it was because of the color of the paint or what, but the clear coat didn’t really make it look any different. Or maybe that’s how its supposed to work.