Alrighty, time to cut some stuff out of steel! The first thing that I had to do was set up the file to cut my part. That was a little bit harder than I anticipated, because it took me a while to figure out how to create arcs in Illustrator. And yes, I could have downloaded a file off of the interweb, but since this was a relatively simple shape to make, I thought it would be good experience for me to make it myself from scratch – in any case, it turned out pretty nice, in my opinion. However, I didn’t make all of these lines into one shape, which would come back to bite me later.

 

I then came back the next day to cut the part with the help of one of the lab assistants, and the cut worked on the first try. Just kidding, of course it didn’t. It turned out that because I had the file as a bunch of separate lines, the machine treated each line as a different cut, and thus went to automatically set the z height at the start of each cut. The problem was, after the first line was cut, the nozzle then went a bit too low, since the metal was cut, and so it started to drag on the piece when trying to cut the next line. The lab tech eventually sorted this problem out by combining all of the lines into one path on the TorchMate software.

 

After that, I made the first cut, which turned out to be a little bit too small, although the shape was immaculate, so I reimported it at the proper scale, and cut my two full size batarangs!

Next I borrowed the angle grinder from Joe and removed a lot of the large bits of dross from around the edge of my batarangs. This was a relatively straightforward process, although I discovered that – perhaps due to my technique, or just a quirk of the machine – the angle grinder didn’t do a very good job of removing the dross at the very sharp points/corners.

Thus, after angle grinding, I went into the OEDK and used the files to smoothen out the dross near the sharp corners of my pieces. By the time I finished this, it was so late that there were no more lab techs on shift, which meant I could no longer get into the wet lab. As a result, I resolved to come back the next day for sandblasting.

And so it was – I came back the next day and sand blasted the pieces. After that, I took them out back to the loading dock, spray painted one side, left them to dry for an hour whilst I did some work in the OEDK, and then came back and spray painted them, left them dry whilst doing more work, and then voila!! I had two (and a half) batarangs, ready to go!

Of course, I cleaned up all of my workspaces – the plasma cutter, the loading dock, and the table where I did the filing.

 

Cost:

Labor:  $90  ->  $15/hr for 6 hr
Metal: $10  ->  6″ x 12″ stainless steel, 0.018 inch thickness
Plasma Cutter: $165  ->  Rent for a day
Angle Grinder: $26
Spray Paint: $3

Total: $294