The idea for this assignment came when I was talking to a friend about the upcoming season of Game of Thrones. Sigils in the show are very symbolic and I thought it would be cool to incorporate them into my diamond. The first steps I took was to look for a good image to trace in Illustrator. I first used a simpler stencil design but since it was not detailed enough, I opted for the picture below.
From there, I had to work out the kinks in the image trace and once completed, I had the following design. The dragons in the center and the words both were to be engraved while the side triangles were to be cut out.
I wanted to play around with colors as well which led me to choose a fill scheme in Illustrator to model my final product. I chose black and red since the color for the sigil is red while it would look especially popping if it had a black background.
Once I had the file completed, I could then start cutting it out. I first created a model out of wood to see if the design was actually capable of being engraved with the amount of detail and surprisingly the laser cutter did an extremely good job of getting the engraving done right.
With this initial prototype done, I proceeded to the plasma cutter to cut the shape out of metal. The piece of metal I used was 1/32″ steel and initially there were many problems with cutting. The tip kept snagging and stopping and nobody could figure out why. Finally, Joe told me that I had to lower the voltage as well as the amperage and this caused the shape to be cut out perfectly. With the two cutouts in hand, I then used the angle grinder to smooth out the edges and make then perpendicular to the flat surfaces.
With the edges smoothed, the surface also needed to be smoothed and made uniform. First, I used the sandblaster in the wood shop to maintain an even surface and then used 1000 grit sand paper to create a very smooth surface. With those done, the objects were painted in black.
Once the paint dried, I took them to the laser cutter and engraved my design and instructions. Initially, I wanted to put tape on the painted surface in order to mask the areas of the dragon so that I could paint it red. However, I realized that this was unfeasible due to the size of the diamonds and I scraped that idea after doing some test cuts on a third piece of metal I cut out.
The final step in the process would be to apply a clear finishing coat of paint to act as a sealant. This proved to be a problem. When I sprayed the gloss protection, it reacted with the paint I had put on already and caused bubbling to occur. 
The paint was peeling and extremely uneven which meant I would have to restart the paint job. This pushed back my timeline and is the reason why I’m up at 4 am currently typing this blog. Once I managed to reapply the paint and proceed to the laser etching, I arrived at my final product.
Due to my mistake at the end, I added about 8 more man hours to this assignment. I would imagine that would greatly increase the cost. It probably took me about 16 hours total for this assignment and at the average income rate of $23, that would equal $368. The time on the machine would probably be about an hour which would cost $15. The adobe license is $20 and the cost of the materials would most likely be equal to $10 since the pieces were small and they were bought in bulk. The total cost of this project would be $413. Honestly, I wouldn’t pay that much for this and I think my mistake really hurt the price. Overall, I enjoyed this assignment.
