This week our homework for Engi 210 was to plasma cut and process two identical pieces out of a diamond shape. So I did what any logical human who was given this assignment would do and made cannabis leaves.

My first step was to make a sketch of the leaf on illustrator. I made a copy an image online and pasted and resized it over the diamond. Using primarily the pen tool to make the leaf out of a combination of curves and straight line, I traced over the entire leaf. The sketch on the torch mate software can be seen below.

With my sketch ready, it was time to plasma cut. I prepared the image to be cut on the software, found a piece of 1/16th inch aluminum that I wanted to cut out of, and ran a line test to figure out the best speed was 130. I plasma cut three identical leaves (and one smaller one that I messed up the sizing with) in the highly likely event that I messed something up.

 

I now had to make my leaves look smooth. I tried using a file to take off dross, but the thin shape made it hard to apply enough pressure. So I used a belt sander and an angle grinder instead, which worked much better.

With most of the dross gone, it was time to sand blast my leaves in order to make them look a lot nicer.

Once I finished this, I used sandpaper to smooth out my leaves even more, starting with coarse 50 sandpaper and working my up to extremely fine 1500 sand paper.

My last step was to spray paint. Obviously, the only color I could possibly use was green. I applied one coat to both sides, waited 45 minutes, and gave the leaves one final sanding before applying the second and final coat.

 

And now, my leaves were done and ready to be enjoyed!   

I am happy about how this project turned out. The leaves look good, and very similar to the real thing (or so my friends tell me, I wouldn’t know). There are a couple of imperfections – some dross was in too awkward of a spot to remove, and the stem isn’t as smooth as the rest of the leaf, but this is because it was very thin and difficult to work with. I also had to write the instructions rather than laser cut it, but I haven’t had my laser cutting training yet.

Between working in illustrator, plasma cutting, and post-processing, this project took me 4.5 hours to complete. I probably rendered about a square foot of aluminum useless, which costs roughly 5 dollars. The machine costs from the plasma cutter, angle grinder, belt sander, and sand blaster do add up, if each costs $10 dollars to use that’s $40 in total. Assuming my labor costs $12/hour and the spray paint costs an additional 5$, this project costs $104.