For this project, we were tasked with creating two identical diamonds with the plasma cutter. I started by creating my CAD file which was just the canvas template with the letter “J” in the middle. I chose this design as my name is John. I then proceeded to make the design one shape with Adobe Illustrators shape generator functionality. After this, I went to the plasma cutter, uploaded my file, and then started my cut with 1/8″ steel. I cut four diamonds with two having less defects than the other two. The diamonds and slag can be seen below:

I then proceeded to go to the angle grinder to remove the slag and clean the surface of two of the diamonds. I found that the angle grinder quickly heated the metal up, causing the surface to turn black. I was able to remove this imperfection by grinding more, but it is not great for the structural integrity of the piece. To grind, I used the magnet block to secure my piece and just worked on removing surface imperfections. After grinding, one can see what the diamonds looked like:

In the image above, one can see the jagged edge on the inside that needed to be flattened out. I used a file and just manually filed this section down. This process was relatively quick and didn’t take too much effort. I proceed to sandblast each diamond after the filing of the inside edge. This gave the surface a matte finish and allowed me to apply my finish. I was going to use a clear coat, but decided to use white spray paint as I liked how that looked. The final pieces can be seen below:

Overall, the process was very interesting and I enjoyed working with metal. There was a lot of angle grinding and the metal was hard to move at times. The biggest error in my process came when I heated the metal up too much while angle grinding. The sandblaster gave a really nice finish and I was able to get a nice spray-painted finish on the whole piece.

For a cost estimate, I put in around 4 hours. For the sake of this project,  an entry level metal worker makes around $12 / hr ($24,000 per year / (50 weeks * 40 hrs/week). The metal sheet can be priced anywhere from $15 to $40, so lets just say $25. A can of spray paint costs around $5, so the total cost without including the machining equipment was $78.