This week, we were tasked to plasma cut and then post process a customized diamond.

I started off by picking one of the diamonds in the adobe illustrator file on canvas and then finding a silhouette of a dog paw print to put on it. To put the image on the diamond, I image traced the picture to make it a vector.

After making the .ai file, I imported it into torchmate to make it a .dxf file and followed all the other steps in order to plasma cut. I cut 5 of them so that I would have room for error during post processing.

The next step after plasma cutting is to get all the slag off using an angle grinder. This sounds simple but in reality, it was really scary for me. I watched Cole do it first and there were a lot of sparks flying, which is not a fun sight for me. Plus, I was definitely in the wrong clothing to be angle grinding. So, I waited till after break to do it and made sure that I was in clothing that was not that nice (i.e. my lab assistant shirt). This time, Andre showed me how to use it and how to round the edges which added a nice touch to the finished product. I eventually got over my fear of the sparks and got it done. The angle grinder took off all the slag and some of the rust so it was shinier than before.

 

After angle grinding, I decided to sand blast the pieces because I really like the matte look after sand blasting. This step took forever because the sand blaster is basically on its last leg and there wasn’t much sand in the container. After sand blasting the pieces, the metal was totally matte and smooth, kind of like a macbook finish. I really wanted to just stop there because it looked so nice but I decided to finish it with a primer and a glossy coat so that I can put my laser etching skills to the test.

My next step was to laser etch my steps and name into the back of the diamond. I first used one of my spare pieces to laser etch with the fiber laser. I played around with the settings a little and finally decided that 35 speed and 100 power and 55 frequency was the best. I also changed the image dithering to stucki because it looked cleaner. The test run looked really good and clean so I moved on to my real diamonds. I quickly found that these settings were not as optimal on the real diamonds. This is probably because I had more clear top coat on the real ones. They still came out okay though.

From this assignment, I learned that the angle grinder is a scary but useful tool and that post processing takes way more time that I thought. If I were to do this assignment again, I would make sure that my test pieces and my final pieces were more similar so the outcomes would be the same.