After debating my plasma cut piece design for a while, I decided to make my diamond look like a slice of cheese! I wanted to do this by simply cutting random circles in my diamond then post-processing it nicely and coloring it yellow. Because I had such a simple design to plasma cut, I wanted to make it look as polished as possible.
I started by making my design, which only took about 5 minutes because all I had to do was use the eraser tool on illustrator. I removed circles of varying sizes from the diamond by changing the eraser size for each hole. This is the final 2D drawing:
Next I plasma cut three of them (one extra just in case I messed up) out of a 1/8 in. sheet of aluminum. I had to use straight lead in lines when cutting the circles because the curved ones didn’t line up well. After plasma cutting, the metal looked like this:
Next, I used a file to remove the dross and smooth out some of the rough edges. This is what the pieces looked like after I did this:
Once I finished filing, I used sandpaper of grit 400 then 1200 to smooth out the edges even more and polish up the metal a little bit. This is what it looked like afterward:
Next, I sandblasted each piece to get more of a smooth, matte texture on the cheese which would make it look more like real cheese. After sandblasting, I noticed some scratch lines from filing the pieces which were a little irritating but not too big of an issue to try to fix. After sandblasting, the three pieces looked like this:
Next, I spray painted the three diamonds yellow. The first can I used started blowing out paint chunks, so my bottom layer on one of them had somewhat of an uneven coating. I found a different can that worked better after that and painted the rest with that can. After spray painting, the scratch lines went away. In addition, the paint I used was glossy, which made the cheese look more like fake packaged cheese which wasn’t ideal but there was no matte yellow paint anyways. After spray painting a few layers on each side, the final product looked like this:
Cost Analysis:
A 12 x 12 sheet of 1/8 aluminum costs about $17, and one diamond is about a quarter of that size, so the raw metal per piece costs around $4.25. For using a file, the plasma cutter, and sandblasting, I estimate that renting these devices would be around $15 an hour. It took me around 2.5 total hours of using these three things, which comes out to be $42. In addition, the sandpaper I used was around $4 for the two grits, and the spray paint was $4 (I probably used around a quarter of it, so $1 of spray paint use). Lastly, the whole thing took me around 4 hours, so if I was paid $12 an hour the total labor cost would be $48.
Total cost:
4.25 + 42 + 4 + 1 + 48 = $99.25
