Man the waterjet cutter gave me some trouble a few times, but I really like how my metal pieces came out.

Cost analysis:

144in^2 aluminum sheet costs $11.47 (home depot), I used 12.5in^2, so the cost for the material I used was $18.31/hour.

Spray paint, negligible amount.

Total of $1.

Labor Analysis

I spent about an hour and fifteen mins wrestling with the waterjet cutter, and then about 45 mins post-processing. This is a total of 2 hours, and at $18.31 an hour which is a total $36.62 for labor.

 

Total Cost
$37.62

 

Action shot! Believe it or not this was the best view I could get of the waterjet cutter doing its thing…

Here was the piece right after sandblasting

After I was done with the sanding and the sandblasting, I spray-painted my diamonds. Red on the front, and  Blue on the back.

 

I didn’t realized until Izzie pointed it out that the inside of the metro logo (the three bars) it was all colored blue.

Once I let the spray-paint dry, I took off the tape but there was some bleed through. To fix this, I inverted the tape and then sandblasted the bleed away. This made my spray-painted lines straight, this worked really well on the top line.

Areas of improvement

I could have sandblasted away the excess paint a little better, and made the lines sharper.

If I had more time, I would have put more colors on the diamonds, maybe a black border.