On the whole, I really enjoyed this project because it’s an incredibly powerful way to develop high-strength, durable, custom metal products. My inspiration for my eyes started with the class that introduced the project to us- one diamond was a 3D yin yang shape and I though it looked really really cool, so a lot of my design was based around making it able to be bent outwards. Quite seperately, I decided that I wanted to do an eye.
Below is an early phase in the design- you can see that almond eye shape itself is off-center and the crescent iris is angled slightly to the left. Those were eventually edited out, but I think the design in Illustrator was the most difficult steps of this project. I spent at least three hours playing with different designs, and on small aesthetic details like getting the two arms to intersect the curve at the same points. I eventually switched to a sketch in Fusion, which helped until I realized that Fusion’s splines do not translate particularly well to Illustrator. Anyway in the final design, I decided to do two seperate arms for the pupil and iris (I thought it looked more balanced and dynamic). I made the shapes for the iris and the pupil closer together in 2D, know that they would lose some distance as they were bent up and out.
I also learned a lot about the limits of the plasma cutter during this process, especially that it has a MASSIVE kerf in comparison to the laser cutter. This is an example of an earlier design with a bigger iris and less distance between the pupil and iris. The plasma cutter didn’t even attempt to try and cut that gap, because it was about 0.1″ away.
While not that difficult in the end, one of the more frustrating aspects of this project was formatting the Illustrator in Torchmate properly for the plasma cutter. I had a handful and a half of failed prints, including one that cut the arms off entirely (leaving just an almond shape in the middle of the diamond), and the one pictured below, which just didn’t cut the diamond. In between each print, it was at least 20 minutes of editing my file, rechecking all my anchor points, and deleting the spontaneous duplicates in Torchmate before I had a print come out correctly. This is where I lost the most time on the project, but it was a much more satisfying experience when the cut finally worked, also pictured below.
Post processing started here. The first step was to angle-grind the slag off, which I really enjoyed when I got the hang of it. Going perpendicularly and “pushing” the slag off with the edge of the grinder was a good strategy, and hitting it really hard so that the slag got orange and the picking it off with a fingernail was also effective. Using the grinder like a sander did not work particularly well.
By this time the sand-blaster wasn’t functional. I sanded with the orbital sander at 120 grit, and did 220 and then 320 grit by hand. I stopped at 320 because google informed me this was the ideal grit for spraypaint- rough enough for the paint to adhere, but smooth enough to get a good finish. In order below are the unsanded, 120, 220, and 320 versions of the same couple of pieces.
I also trial-ran bending the pieces to make sure that I a) physicaly was able to and b) it looked sufficiently cool.
After sanding and the final two pieces were bent into shape, I started spray painting. The images above do not scream “eye” at first and so a lot was riding on the paint job. My first attempt was an absolute, unquestionable disaster. I was very impatient with the various tape jobs, which resulted in not enough paint in their proper sections, and way too much on my hands. I started by painting over the biggest sections first and then moving inwards, which meant on average longer wait time inbetween moving to the next section, and more risk of a section being ruined. I also had an idea for the iris that involved scraping blue paint with the wire brush radially. With one I didn’t wait long enough and left basically just bare metal, and with the other the paint was already mostly dried so it came off in sections.
Luckily for me, I discovered that isopropyl alcohol is a magic eraser for spray paint on metal, so I got to try again without recutting or re-sanding. I gave my patience some time to recover and came back again the next day, and I’ve documented the process below.
In short: 1. Tape everything, paint pupil black. 2. Paint legs and iris white, as a base coat. 3. Blue just on top of the white basecoat, wait 5 minutes, scrape with wire brush. 4. Paint outside of the almond black (I kind of wanted to do a blue/black/white space-like effect on the outside, but that did not work because the cans were almost empty and spraying erratically). 5. Paint the back and edges of the interior shape white to give some contrast and look cleaner. 6. Clear coat to hide the spray paint bubbles and seal the text of the instructions.
And here’s the final result!
Cost Analysis:
We’re in the unique position of being to use a hand-held plasma cutter mounted on a CNC table. I have no idea how to price genius and given that it was not created for this project specifically, I will not be including it in my cost analysis.
- 1 x 24″ x 36″ steel sheet- $14 at Lowes
- 1 x 120 grit sandpaper for an orbital sander- $2 on Amazon
- 1 x Assorted Sandpaper sheets- $3 on Amazon.
- 3 x Spray paint (blue, black, white)- $18
- 1 x Clear Coat- $7
- 7 x hours of labor at a liveable wage- $105.
Total : $149
