For this project, we were tasked with creating a personalized diamond using the plasma cutter. I chose to make my diamond out of aluminium because 1. I like aluminium and 2. it is easier to work with than steel. One of the disadvantages that I soon found out however, is that it is also more flexible than steel so my pieces got bent a few times and never really bent back the same way. While using the plasma cutter, I was sure to be judicious with my cookiecutting placement so that I could conserve materials, you can see below how tight my tolerance was on the second cut, with only a few millimeters separating the two.

This first cut and initial design were kind of a let down because I neglected to read the part of the instructions that told us not to scale the diamonds up or down… thus I had to trash these two cuts and start over. I had already filed down my initial designs which took forever due to their intricacy, so I decided to go with something much simpler this time, shown below. 

This design was very simple, and I like it because it looks like a J but is also not entirely recognizable at first glance, and you’ve gotta look twice to really figure out what it is. Regardless this is the initial appearance of the pieces after being filed down to remove dross and slag. The filing didn’t take too long because the aluminium is relatively soft when you go at it with the correct tools. I had to use multiple different files to reach all the different areas of the diamond, but it was easy enough.
As I said above, the aluminium is relatively malleable and was easy to bend, which is shown above. I just bent it back with my hands to try to correct for the error. After being filed, I took the pieces up to the sandblaster and was really impressed with the speed of the machine and the quality of the finish it put on the pieces. My initial cuts had some weird stains and a lot of scratches on them, but the sandblaster quickly took those off and left a nice matte finish. Pictured below you can see a direct comparison of the finish on the sandblaster and the pre-blasted piece.

After blasting my pieces, I went at them with a clear coat acrylic. I didn’t think this would take too long but it actually did and was a pretty big pain in the butt. I put down a drop cloth (which will be important later) and sprayed them. 

I didn’t quite realize how long the whole spray painting thing would take- gotta shake, gotta spray, gotta DRY, and only one side at a time because to spray one side you have to put the other face-down. I planned on putting two coats on each side, and I got tired of waiting so I headed down to the electrical lab and dual-wielded some heat guns to quickly dry them. Having never done this before, I accidentally went past drying out the paint and into melting the acrylic so that it continued to appear wet. I baked it for about 10 minutes before trying to touch it to see if it was still wet, cause it looked wet, and then ended up burning the crap out of my finger on molten acrylic that Jeremy later told me was at 300 degrees. The next time I used the guns I did it for about 1 minute each with 45s to cool, that worked much better. 

Here we can see my awesome dual wielding setup. Work smarter not harder!

Like I said, I used a cardboard drop cloth, which ended up sticking to the spray on acrylic during the drying process. I had to peel it off and it ended up ripping big holes in it, so I then had to REpaint the thing. I was frustrated and will avoid melting my piece to the cardboard in the future.

Respraying the damaged piece.

Finally, I got two identical diamonds. Cut from aluminium, filed, sandblasted, and finally painted, they look kinda cool?

Cost analysis: Labor 5 hours= $200, aluminium $13, $20,000 for the plasma cutting table, $24 for spray paint, $1 for cardboard, $200 for sandblaster. Total cost= $20,425, or $10,212.50 per diamond. It would probably be cheaper to just go to Tiffany and Co.