This week’s project was to make a diamond that would go on the wall in the OEDK. I knew early on that I wanted it to be plant themed, but I didn’t know which plant to put on my diamond. I pulled lots of images from the Internet to image trace in Illustrator, but I eventually chose a floppy flower and some palm leaves. I knew that the plasma cutter couldn’t handle much detail, so I tried to go with less detailed designs.

Having finished my file, I went in to the OEDK to plasma cut my piece. Despite giving up on some of the more intricate designs Torchmate still had to make some simplifications. The details on the leaves were too thin for the plasma cutter to cut, so they were just skipped over. Torchmate also picked up on some extra triangles in the leaves that it really wanted to cut out, but since I was cutting a negative it wasn’t much of a problem.

The first trial I ran ended up coming out of the plasma cutter in pieces because the design was too close to the border. I went back to my AI file to adjust for the kerf and the cut worked!

After pulling the piece out of the plasma cutter, I used the angle grinder to take the dross off and the sandblaster to get rid of the scratches on the surface. Then I spray painted the surface white. I wanted pink, but I couldn’t find it. Finally, I added the steps I used on the back of the diamond, and I was done!

Overall, the process took me about 6 hours. The steel sheet costs about $15, and I estimate the cost to rent each tool/program (plasma cutter, Illustrator, sandblaster, angle grinder) for an hour to be about $10. The spray paint was cheap and costs about $5. If I pay myself $10 an hour, the total cost comes out to $115.