Hello!!! This is Lindsey coming back to you with another Engineering Escapade. This time, I got to use the plasma cutter (ooooh aaahhhh) which is an incredibly intimidating machine if I’m being honest. The design I decided to cut onto my metal was my dog!! Not exactly, but I tried to get a good image of a miniature schnauzer onto there from https://thenounproject.com/. I was looking at old Engi blog posts for inspiration and found someone did a bottle opener, and I thought the shape for a bottle opener resembled a dog bone, so I threw that on there as well so she’s functional as well as gorgeous.

These were the images I originally used, but the dog design appeared too detailed for the plasma cutter to cut, with lines too thin. So, I ended up changing up the design and then went to plasma cut. They turned out fantastic!! I then used the angle grinder to clean up the cut pieces.

The left two are angle grinded and the right two are not to show the contrast. After that, I sanded down the pieces using files and sand paper. Then it was time to move on to paint application. This is where things went badly. I first applied paint and let it dry, but when I went back someone else had applied some paint in a similar area and it had gotten on my pieces!!

It’s only really noticable on one of them here, but there were little paint remnants from another paint job on all of my pieces :(. So I went back to repaint, but it did not go as well as the first time, so I am a little bit disappointed. However, life goes on, right?!

So, to total up costs, the cost of the steel I estimate to be around $15, the spray paint around $3, and my precious time of labor to be $15/hour for around 2 hours, so $30. This totals to $48 so with tax, we’ll round up to $50.