The plasma cutter made me appreciate the laser cutter. This project wasn’t bad at all, but I did have to go through four different designs/icons before settling on a very simplified synapse as the only decent shape I could get to cut properly. That, combined with some very nasty snorkeling excursions to the bottom of the plasma cutter bed made for somewhat of a rough start. Here’s what happened:

Level 1: Cutting and Grinding

As stated above, settling on a design was rough. Everything I cut seemed to range from horribly wrong to just slightly off enough to be annoying to look at. This led me to a simple synapse design as my best bet. All four of my diamonds came out with a pretty high level of slag, so I had to give it a quite healthy dose of angle grinding:

Unfortunately, I went a bit too far and took off more material than I wanted to at the edges, and thus had to make up for it with post-processing. Even more unfortunately, the sand blaster was completely kaput, so I had to hit it with old-fashioned sanding…

Level 2: Post-Processing

I wasn’t sure where to begin with sanding, so I just grabbed a low 60-grit pad and went to work manually sanding it down. After hitting the edges and observing my work, my heart dropped to see the way I had just lacerated my piece:

Even after hitting it with higher grits of sandpaper, the scratches weren’t coming out. This made my next choice for prototyping easy: primer. I knew I could use primer to fill in imperfections with the cutting, so I decided to apply it to at least hide, if not fill in, the new imperfections I introduced as a side effect of sanding.

Luckily, I was right, and the primer turned out well. The absurd humidity of Houston made it take forever to dry, but I’m happy with the product that came out:

With that, I decided to go no further, as I appreciated the plain grey look of the primer and its uniformity. I began to use a very light high-grit sanding to finish off the primer, but metal dust from previous uses began to get in the coat and scared me into discontinuing. I thus left the diamonds post-processed as they are, and I’m pretty happy with the result!

Cost Estimate

~10″x5.8″ steel at $0.14/sq.in: $8.02
~1 oz Rust-Oleum Gray Filler Primer at $1.24/oz: $1.24
~1 hour labor at $15/hr: $15

Total Cost: $24.26