Ever since I was about 14 years old I have been a fan of the American animated show RWBY (pronounced “ruby”). As Volume 9 of the show has just begun airing, I thought it would be cool to design my metal diamond in honor of this. I decided that it would be cool to cut my favorite character Weiss’ rapier in the center of the diamond. Here is an image of what the rapier, Myrtenaster, looks like in the show, and the one I would later vectorize:

To my surprise, nobody had yet created a vectorized image file of Myrtenaster, so I had to do it myself. I played around a bit with Illustrator’s SVG conversion tool, but the color range on the above image did not contain enough contrast for it to properly vectorize it the way I wanted. Due to this, I ended up tracing it with line segments instead. Here is my final vectorized conversion of the image above, placed onto the diamond and ready to cut:

Cutting using the waterjet was much easier than I anticipated. The only issue I encountered is that when I went to select my metal, we were all out of aluminum, so I needed to use steel. This would have been completely fine if I’d had any idea what type of steel it was, and there was nobody around at the time to ask. Due to this, I needed to try about 4 different cutting settings before I found one that was able to cut cleanly through the metal, instead of not at all (in the case of the default aluminum 6061 settings, unsurprisingly) or too roughly (in the case of some of the maximum strength settings for tougher steels, resulting in an ugly jagged cut). In the end, the rapier cut came out very well:

Immediately after I cut both of my diamonds, I took them to the basement to sand away the jagged edges and a lot of the surface dross. I was very surprised by how much of a different simply sanding the metal made! Here is a picture of my two diamonds immediately after sanding with ~120 grit:

To get a neat finish, I then took my metal into the sandblaster, and then sanded again:

These were now ready to paint. Surprisingly, painting turned out to be the part of this project that I hit the most issues with, due to both the lack of blue spray paint and my stubbornness. I wanted the background coat of the diamond to be blue (to fit the RWBY theme I had in mind) so I attempted to paint it using blue acrylic paint instead. This went…not great. Several times the paint began reacting with the metal:

And if it didn’t, it was difficult to get a clean finish due to the brush I needed to use. After several days of repeated coats and failed attempt, we finally got a new shipment of spray paint, at which point I gladly decided to abandon the blue acrylic in favor of the light blue spray paint:

The last step was my vinyl masking! I was very excited about this, as I had an idea to use the vinyl as a stencil in order to spray paint Weiss’ snowflake icon onto the diamond. I created another vector file to send to the vinyl cutter – this time Adobe was able to do the hard part for me:

The first time I attempted the stencil maneuver I made two mistakes: 1. Using, the non-sticky vinyl, and 2: Completely over-spraying the diamond with white spray paint (likely as a result of the first issue). This resulted in:

Which, when peeled off, was all blotted and messy. I ended up needed to repaint the base coat over the failed snowflakes and then try again.

This time I did not overspray the diamonds and the snowflakes both came out great (with the exception of one spoke on each that didn’t come out perfectly). The final diamonds are shown below:

Overall, the production steps for these pieces of metal were as follows:

1. Waterjet cut

2. Sanding and filing

3. Sandblast

4. Spray Paint blue

5. Vinyl Mask

6. Spray white

Needing to produce two identical products definitely made me more deliberate in my design decisions and production steps. Nothing was done on a whim and everything needed to be easily replicable.

COST:

Steel sheet metal: $15 (Lowes)

Waterjet cutting: ~$20 for 1 hr

Two cans of spray paint: ($6 x 2) = $12

1 roll of vinyl: $8 (Amazon)

8 hours of work time: ($15 x 8) = $120

TOTAL: $175