“Tori, by the end of the night, we will plasma cut this duck.” Dr. Wettergreen stabbed a book of dxf files with his pointer finger and looked eagerly up at me.

I just kind of looked at him and held up my TARDIS flash drive, which had the file I was planning on cutting – a diamond containing cut out circles that I planned to modify and turn in for my actual project.

I had made the diamond in Illustrator in the span of about 10 minutes roughly an hour previously. I used the diamond template that Dr. Wettergreen had given me, randomly drew a bunch of circles on it, and then used the ShapeMaker tool to create one coherent shape from it that looked random and abstract but also really cool.

Christina and I had made an appointment to “practice” plasma cutting with Dr. Wettergreen on Thursday afternoon, and because I already knew how to plasma cut, I had already prepped my file for the project with the intention of just cutting that and knocking out two birds with one stone.

Plasma cutting with Dr. Wettergreen was an adventure. After we went on a quest to Ryon Labs to grab a fresh sheet of steel for the class (mainly because we were having major reliability issues with the plasma cutter), Christina and I loaded up our files and prepared to cut while Dr. Wettergreen ended up digging through a book he found containing random dxf files. So in between debating about proper cut speeds and whether or not copying and pasting multiple patterns in the Torchmate program would affect the tool paths, we also had debates over the best Zelda game (triggered by an image of an ocarina) and which stringed instrument was actually depicted in the image Dr. Wettergreen pointed to because they all look the same.

I can feel you scoffing, but you try to look at a context-less sketch of a stringed instrument and be able to identify whether it is a violin or viola. I played viola for four years and I probably couldn’t tell you unless I actually got to hold it.

Anyway, Christina and I worked on cutting out our pieces while Dr. Wettergreen ultimately decided to cut out a goat for his sister-in-law. So in between the outlines of diamonds that we left behind in the metal, there is also a silhouette of a goat.

At this point, we were in the middle of like three assignments for ENGI 210 and this one was due far off in the future, so after I cut out the base pieces, I didn’t touch this project for probably a week.

In that time, one afternoon, I was checking Instagram and I found a post from my favorite band Marianas Trench. This wouldn’t usually be blog-worthy, but they had been suspiciously radio silent for the past month, and also, there was the matter of the content of the post…

“Want to be in Marianas Trench’s next music video?”

Um, hell yes.

“Are you available on February 8th?”

I did some mental math and realized that February 8th actually fell during midterm recess.

“What’s your availability in Vancouver?”

Damn it. Vancouver is literally 2,500 miles away from Houston.

Except, wait. My dad had offered the week before to buy me a plane ticket to visit my boyfriend. Who lives in Seattle. Which is three hours from Vancouver. And I said no.

What I’m saying is, if I had made slightly different decisions in my life, I could have been in Marianas Trench’s next music video.

And not being in that video would have been fine. Except I ended up actually spending my February 8th in the OEDK angrily building a box in Solidworks instead of partying in Canada. So while my box wasn’t working, I basically listened to Marianas Trench on repeat and cried about the life of a Canadian rock star who does not and now will never know I exist.

So I think that’s part of why I was so pissed off in my laser cutter post.

It’s also the reason why this entire blog post is Marianas Trench themed. More specifically, it’s the reason why all of my photo captions are Marianas Trench lyrics. After all, as lead singer Josh Ramsay says in his song “This Means War,” I’d rather be a riot than indifferent.

(I will have you know that it is really, really hard to find semi-relevant song lyrics for an engineering context from a band that writes mainly about relationships and identity and people.)

In between crying about my box, I also worked on my plasma cut pieces. When cutting, we used a cut speed of 60 in/min, which were the settings recommended by the cut samples we found in the machine shop and were also the settings we used when plasma cutting over the summer. However, that also produced a lot of slag on the part that I had to file off. Additionally, because the plasma cutter is by no means a precision instrument, there were some smaller gaps in my design that weren’t cut very well.

So I had to file my part down, and because I had some tiny holes in my part, I found a couple of baby files in Joe’s machine shop that fit perfectly into the slots I needed to file them down, and they worked perfectly to smooth out some of the edges of the inner holes into a shape that fit the circle aesthetic of my project. Dr. Wettergreen had told me that we did have some little files in the OEDK, but I think even he was surprised by the tiny size of the files I was using.

That being said, once I had filed down some of the inner edges, I realized that filing down the edges of the entire piece would take way too long. So I pulled out the big leagues: the angle grinder.

I did not realize that I had used the angle grinder this summer to take apart some welds we had created but ultimately didn’t work. I didn’t know what it was called then; Jeremy just handed me some safety glasses and a blue machine with a spinning blade and told me to go to town because it’s a fantastic tool for sanding down metal (and tearing apart steel welds, if that gives you any indication of its power).

Flash forward six months. I was talking to Christina about accessibility to knowledge and equipment in the OEDK. Ultimately we agreed that a lot of tools are a lot easier to use than we expect them to be (especially if you can find someone who already knows how to use said tool), but this was the important part of the exchange:

Christina: “Yeah, all I did was talk to Jeremy and say, ‘Yo, Jeremy, how do you use the angle grinder?’ and five minutes later, I was outside on the loading dock, grinding my piece down.”
Me: “Okay, what even is the angle grinder? That blue thing in the machine shop?” (I know that sounds vague, but the angle grinder might be the only tool in the entire OEDK that is blue.)
Christina: “Yeah!”
Me: “Oh, so that’s what that is!”

And I went to the machine shop, asked Joe for permission, and took the angle grinder (and its heavy-as-hell metallic base thing) outside to grind down my pieces.

Angle grinding is fantastic for grinding off metallic surfaces (including slag, rust, plasma residue, etx) and it leaves a nice, smooth, shiny finish. It also produces a ton of sparks, so I feel kind of like a badass when using it. It is one of my favorite tools to use.

Now I had to figure out how to post-process my design and make it look interesting. Dr. Wettergreen said that post-processing sometimes takes up to 50% of the total project time, and I didn’t doubt him… especially because the entire point of this project was to learn how to plasma cut and do post-processing.

I was thinking through ideas in class, bouncing ideas off of classmates, muttering something along the lines of, “Well, the circles give it kind of a 1960’s vibe, and if I paint it red, I could maybe give it some 1960’s organic post-apocalyptic undertones…” I broke off about halfway through that sentence upon hearing how ridiculous it sounded, and I glanced up to see Dr. Wettergreen and Serena staring at me like I was crazy. Okay then, maybe that’s a no to the 960’s organic post-apocalyptic undertones.

So instead I decided to channel my inner Slytherin by painting part of the diamond green to play off the silver steel. I would emphasize the inner circles by painting them green and then leave the rest of the metal bare.

Easy enough, right?

Wrong. So wrong.

I went back to my Illustrator drawing and used that to create a template I could laser cut to cover up the parts of the diamond I wanted to keep bare while I painted the parts I wanted green. Kind of like painter’s tape, but hopefully more sophisticated and more repeatable.

I laser cut this template out of cardboard and taped it on to the metal. I was ready to paint.

The only problem is that there is no paint in the OEDK.

Sure, there’s some spray paint in the basement, but most of the cans are either empty or don’t work, so my options were grey primer, fluorescent green, or bright orange. Except the orange bottle was missing, so I was down to fluorescent green and grey primer. Which would look fantastic on top of silver steel.

So I called up a friend of mine who works at the other Makerspace on campus, and I was able to borrow a bottle of green acrylic paint and a couple of paintbrushes from McMurtry (upon the firm promise to give it back and not leave it at the OEDK). I was fine painting by hand because I was scared of the impreciseness of spray paint and I like brush painting anyway.

I painted a couple of coats of green onto all three metallic diamonds that I had cut. This proved to be a mistake for a couple of reasons. Using water to apply the paint apparently caused the steel to rust, and the brush strokes were super visible and ugly, and, once I removed the cardboard, some of the paint had bled to parts of the metal I wanted to leave bare.

So I was left with no usable pieces and had to start over. On the bright side, I knew what I had done wrong, and I had done some experimentation, so I had a much better idea of what was going to work this time around. I am also a lab tech, so that meant I could come back at night and rip through a large portion of this project in one go because I knew what I was doing and would have unimpeded access to that machines I needed.

I was also supposed to help Christina laser cut her box on Sunday night, so I had already planned on being at the OEDK late anyway. She didn’t get back to Rice until 1:30AM due to flight delays, but I was still able to get a lot of useful work done.

I started by cutting new metal pieces out of the plasma cutter. This was super easy because I was using a relatively new piece of metal that had wide open spaces, and I had used the plasma cutter several times before. The only difficulty came in trying to lift the large sheet of steel onto the bed by myself because I am not the strongest person around, but I was able to do it.

Then I filed and angle ground my pieces down, just like before. There had been no problems with those steps in the process. I just had to redo them to create more pieces to work with because the original pieces were too far gone to use.

Except for the fact that I was outside on the dimly lit loading dock using an angle grinder at midnight. So it was a little difficult to see and I kind of ground some edges thinner than I was supposed to.

Oh well, nothing a little silver Sharpie won’t fix.

I had learned previously that the cardboard templates didn’t work very well because the paint bled under them. So following the advice of Mikaela and Thomas, I put a bunch of tape on an abandoned scrap of acrylic and cut my template out of tape so I could directly stick it onto the metal and prevent the paint from bleeding.

Except I didn’t account for the fact that shapes reverse when you flip them over. Oops. I tried to just tape on the templates backwards, but the entire point of making the templates out of tape is so it would stick to the metal. As I told Anna, I could either be lazy or do it right, and I decided to do it right. So I went back to the laser cutter and recut the backwards template so it would stick properly.

One of the benefits of using the cardboard templates is that cardboard has depth. So I could spray paint both sides of my cardboard-covered diamonds in one go and then leave them out to dry because neither painted side would actually make contact with the ground. By switching to masking tape templates, sure, I got more precise edges, but I also lost that added height.

Except I still had a ton of tape, so I just awkwardly Franken-taped the cardboard stands to the taped templates so I could have both the added height and the more precise edges. #Engineering

I had previously learned that painting the metal directly was a bad idea for a number of reasons (mainly the rust and the super visible brushstrokes), so I wasn’t going to do that again. So I grabbed the grey primer spray paint I had dismissed earlier and used that as a base coat to protect the metal from the paint and give me an opaque background to work off instead of a reflective one.

I then painted over the primer with the green paint. Although this produced a much duller effect than what I had initially (the original painted metal had, if nothing else, a really nice shine to it), the brush strokes weren’t nearly as obvious and the metal wasn’t rusting. So I considered that a win.

I then proceeded to paint multiple coats of paint in a desperate attempt to make it look pretty and uniform.

Mikaela caught me painting with acrylic paint, and we started talking about the OEDK’s very limited stock of art supplies, which led to her trying to get me to share my paint with my friends, me refusing because I only had the paint because someone trusted me enough to let me have it, and both of us sighing sadly because this was an engineering maker space that doesn’t stock pretty things.

So I finished painting (ish) and left my pieces out to try. But because I had painted both sides, I had to lean them precariously against my water cup so nothing touched the table.

Now, I was left with the question of how I was going to write the post-processing instructions on the back, as per the assignment. I had looked at the examples and didn’t like any of the writing methods past students had used. The Sharpie looked too sloppy. I don’t know how to use a vinyl cutter. The wooden back would make me seem like a copycat.

But you can engrave metal with a laser cutter, right?

I’ve never actually engraved metal before, so I went to ask Mikaela (the laser cutter queen whom I will hopefully one day replace) for advice. She told me that engraving steel was not dangerous as long as I used the fiber laser, but it probably wouldn’t look very good on plain steel because I wasn’t going to etch very much off the surface. Instead, she told me to etch off the painted areas. By burning off the paint, I could create an easily readable color contrast between the green and silver.

However, that also meant that I had to squeeze all of the writing I needed in the colored section on the back of the design.

So, I went back to Illustrator and used the Text-on-a-Path Tool to create lines of text that went perfectly around the holes. It took some careful planning and font size selection to get everything to fit perfectly (especially after I realized the laser cutter computer doesn’t actually have the font I wanted), but I got it all to work in limited space. It just took some size 6.12 text to get it that way.

Now it was time to test the engravings. I had never engraved metal before, but fortunately I had a bunch of extra metal diamonds lying around that I could use to test the settings. After trying a bunch of different settings, I decided to use the recommended settings for annealing stainless steel (7 speed, 100 power, 1 frequency), which took forever but were effective in burning off the paint in the shape I wanted.

So although I totally aligned the test wrong, I proved that I could etch steel and that this was an option worth pursuing.

On Thursday, even though I didn’t get to rock out with a certain Canadian rock band, I did end up partying with another self-professed Canadian rock star. And by “partying,” I mean Thomas and I hung out in the Maker Bar until 1:30 AM talking about boxes and computers and laser cutters. And by “Maker Bar,” I mean the 3D printing corner in the OEDK.

Nerds party hard, am I right?

Thomas had spent the afternoon desperately trying to align the laser cutter so he could perfectly etch his initials on his aluminum wallet. In doing this, he discovered that the laser cutter is not a precision instrument, even though it claims to be. It can get close enough, but your cut will never be perfectly centered because the focus and the origin are slightly enough offset from each other that it’s noticeable, especially in small areas. This was a problem for Thomas because if he messed up, he would have to buy a new wallet. This was a problem for me because if I messed up by even a couple of millimeters, my project would be ruined and I would have had to start over.

So I did more test cuts in a valiant attempt to align my piece with the laser. My initial plan was to use an old diamond for the test cuts, and once I got that perfectly aligned, I would switch it out for a diamond I was actually turning in. And that should have worked, but because the laser cutter isn’t as precise as it claims to be, I couldn’t get the cut precisely exact. I was close, but I was a millimeter or two off from the center, and because I was trying to etch in such small circles, it was exceedingly obvious when the text got cut off.

So I did my best to line it up, and then I just had to go for it because it was 1 AM and I wasn’t going to get this much access to the laser cutter again before the due date, especially because I still had to apply the gloss acrylic coating.

And I got it pretty close to perfect on one of them. Now I just had to repeat that miracle two more times.

Um. I didn’t. But I did try, and I did get close, so I think that’s worth something. My plan is to I think turn all three into Dr. Wettergreen and just hope he takes the best two, especially because I did utilize the exact same process and alignments on all three pieces. They just have some artisinal defects, which is to be expected, because they are handmade.

Ultimately, this project taught me to think about how to make my process as repeatable as possible, which is difficult when I insist on doing everything (angle grinding, painting, aligning the laser, etc) by hand. I think that’s the artist in me insisting on getting my hands dirty when working, whether that’s with grease or paint. I should have realizing that hand-painting the bare metal was a bad idea far sooner than I did so I wouldn’t have wasted so much time waiting for it to dry, but the experimentation phase that led to taught me a lot. It also enabled me to make a much better final prototype when I restarted from scratch already knowing what would and wouldn’t work. If I had had access to decent green spray paint, that would have made my job a lot easier, but I was able to make do (and the brushstrokes added a unique effect that I wouldn’t have otherwise had).

After I etched the metal, I had to spray a clear coating over it to protect it from scratching and ruining all my hard work. Then I touched up the paint one more time to make it perfect and finally called it a day. These diamonds were as good as they were going to get, and it was time for this project to come to an end, both for my sanity and because of the oncoming deadline.