Hello avid fans!

This week’s blog post is about our most recent assignment– plasma cutting and post-processing our favorite state. Instead of choosing my favorite state, I merely choose the one in which I grew up– Florida. See this Subreddit for more information (I cannot guarantee family friendly content).

The process went as followed. I tried my best to document it, but in some cases got too excited and forgot to take pictures. I’ll attach them where I have them

1. Plasma cutting: I plasma cut the state from the provided file out of aluminum. I used the same settings that we had used in class. This made the cut turn out really nice on the first try! Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of this stage, but res assured the piece certainly contained a bit of dross.
2. Rough post-processing: Eager to get my hands dirty, I decided to use a file to remove the dross by hand and round out the edges of the piece. This took like an hour, but it was a great way to release some anger that had built up throughout the day. The piece was a little scratched up so I decided to give it a pass with a wire brush, stroking the piece vertically until it looked even. Given the other processing I did, this ended up not mattering later, but I have a picture of the pieces at this stage. See below.
3. Fine post-processing: Now, for the fun part! I decided that just painting the piece sounded boring, so I decided to go with stripes. I sand blasted both pieces to give them that nice iPhone-looking matte finish. Then, I put some some stripes of masking tape on the pieces diagonally and spray painted them with the finest bottle of Rust-Oleum Sierra Mist Paint&Primer that I could find. Two coats later, see below!
4. Final product: Finally, I peeled the tape off and got my final product! The picture is below. It came out pretty nice and I’m decently proud of the work, though it has some flaws. See it belowIf I had to do this all again, I probably would make sure to clean the pieces to get all of the grease/oil off before post processing. I think that would prevent some of the smudging of the paint and the different levels of sand-blastedness. Also, I would take more time with the spray paint and do more coats, as that always makes things look nicer.

In all, I’d say this project got me in the mindset that post-processing pieces often takes longer than actually making them. It’ll be cool to play with other techniques in the future.

P.S. This is a great website for cropping pictures into squares… Highly recommend for setting featured images