Texas is the first state that I have lived in the US for more than a few days. I followed the instructions on the plasma cutter user’s guide to create a tool path and then saved the DXF file onto my flash drive. Later I opened the file using Torchmate on the computer connected to the plasma cutter. After some axes calibration and test run, I cut the file using 70 feed rate on aluminum.

I chose aluminum because it is a very flexible material and can be easily modified. It took me less than 15 minutes to file two pieces and wire brush them. They look very uniform even only with these two processes.

After filing to remove the dross, and wire brushing to remove the surface stains, I used the sand blaster to roughen the surface and make them look more uniform. One slight issue with the sand blaster is that we can’t really avoid the glove prints since we always need to hold the piece somewhere while sand blasting.

So I decided to spray paint the state figure so that the small yet noticeable glove prints will be covered. And it looked really good after three layers of spray print.

However, there are still some rough surfaces that resulted from various factors such as accidental footprint from someone, excessive paint sticking with cardboard paper, etc. And it is hard to remove them even after three layers of paints.

Still, so far I am satisfied with the two black Texas state figures I created. From this assignment, I learned how to use plasma cutter and post-process to deliver uniform products.