This past week, I used the plasma cutter to make two steel diamonds with a guitar in the center. I wanted to make them as decorations, so I chose to put a Fender Stratocaster on the diamonds, as that is what I play. The first step was to download the diamond template and also an SVG of a Stratocaster from The Noun Project. Once I did this, I imported them into illustrator and combined them into one shape.

After this,  I went to the plasma cutter in the machine shop and started setting up to cut the guitars. I used the steel plate provided and weighed down the metal with the lead blocks. However, the cutter had many problems, so Joe and I spent over an hour trying to figure out what was happening. Eventually, we found that the cutting and retract heights of the nozzle had been set wrong, and after resetting all the heights and switching out nozzles, I was able to upload the G-Code and run the file. It cut very well, and I cut three separate guitars.

Once this was done, I took them to the surface grinder in the machine shop to knock off the slag. Once they were smooth and I couldn’t see any more large chunks of slag, I took it to the sandblaster in the wood shop to give it a homogenous rough texture. Finally, I decided to paint the guitars orange, as I thought the color would look good (And it was one of the only colors available).

Once it dried, I had the final product!

Reflection: The actual process of plasma cutting was not long, but the troubleshooting was. It does not have a steep learning curve, and once we fixed the errors it was fun to use! Finally, my plasma cut pieces came out smaller than the required diamond dimensions, which must’ve accidentally happened at some point during the illustrator process or g-code generation process, so this is something for me to check on future projects.

Cost estimate:

1/8″ Steel sheet: $15:

Time: (3 hours @ $25/hr) : $75

Total: $90