This week our assignment was to produce a metal diamond with a design of our choice using the plasma cutter and any post-processing techniques we wanted. My first idea was…nothing. I’m bad at coming up with creative ideas of my own so I went to google and looked for inspiration. I first searched for “plasma cutter art” to see what kinds of things people had done with the plasma cutter and to see its capabilities in general. While doing this I saw multiple pieces that were landscapes and animals. I thought these looked really cool so I then started looking for free vector files online of landscapes. While this did produce some decent pictures, most were too complicated and detailed to cut using the laser cutter. This made me decide to simplify my design to just animals with no background. Originally I wanted to do an elephant (for no real reason other than that I like elephants) but I couldn’t find a design that I both liked and was simple enough for the plasma cutter. I then moved on to looking for images of giraffes, then antelopes, then finally lions. While looking at vector images of lions, I found an image that I actually liked.

I popped this image into Illustrator and placed it in the middle of a diamond. While I liked the look of it, when I showed it to Adulfo, he pointed out areas of the design that the plasma cutter might struggle with. These issues included the entire tail, some of the gaps between the feathers on the wing, and the small designs in the lion’s mane. Taking Adulfo’s advice into consideration, I messed with the design and simplified it until I had a shape that was simple enough for the laser cutter while still retaining enough details and features to be identified.

Once this was done, it was ready to be plasma cut! I went into the machine shop, set up the plasma cutter according to the directions and pressed start! And…it didn’t cut. I wasn’t sure what the problem was so I set everything back up and tried a dry run. This seemed to work fine so I tried cutting again. And it failed. Again. Very confused at this point, I went to Joe for advice. When he saw what was happening, he said that the problem was that the metal was too thin (it was 1/32 in thick steel) so the machine would cut and then lose contact with the metal and shut itself off. He fixed this by playing with the settings such as the voltage and some others and eventually it worked and I finally had my diamonds cut out.

My next step was to angle grind the pieces so that I could get all that ugly dross off. I found a lab tech who showed me how to use the angle grinder and I got to work. It took some doing but I actually found it quite satisfying, and after some time, I had all the dross cleaned off and it looked like this.

Next, I took it into the woodshop to sand blast and get that nice matte finish. Although I liked the matte look, I also kind of wanted to try polishing it and making it really shiny so I again asked Adulfo for advice and he suggested using the polishing wheel in the machine shop. However, when I tried out the wheel, it worked a little bit but wasn’t doing much which according to Adulfo was probably due to the fact that there was not enough polishing solution on the wheel. Although we looked, we couldn’t find the right type of polishing solution and so I ultimately just decided to go with my first instinct and leave it with that matte finish. I sanded blasted it one more time just to remove any of the marks left by the polishing attempt and it looked like this.

I was originally going to leave it at that but when talking to a lab tech who had done this project before, he mentioned that his was starting to rust in places and suggested that I add a clear coat on the surface in order to prevent rusting, especially because my piece was steel. I decided to take his advice and used a clear coat enamel on top.

Although I’m sure it was good advice, I had never used spray paint before other than when we tried it in class and I flipped the diamonds before the first side was fully dry (it was super humid that day) and so that side ended up sticking to the cardboard a bit. Fortunately that side was the back so it wasn’t a huge deal. Also fortunately, the front coating turned out much better than the front and overall I am quite happy with how this project turned out.

Cost Analysis:
Raw Materials:
12″ x 12″ 1/32 in thick sheet of steel: $20.43
Rust-Oleum Crystal Clear Enamel: $4.02

Total materials cost: $24.45

Labor:
Time Spent (not including drying times): 4 hours
Minimum wage in Texas: $7.25
4 * 7.25 = $29.00

Total labor cost: $29.00

Machine Time:
Plasma Cutter (couldn’t find plasma cutter table rental or service price w/o requesting a quote so I found a makerspace in Houston that has a plasma cutter and am using their monthly membership price): $50.00
Angle Grinder: $26.00

Total machine time cost: $76.00

Total Cost of Project: $129.45