For this assignment, my partner AJ and I decided to have our two diamonds of metal interact for maximum cuteness. As most pet owners will tell you, theirs is the cutest. So we made a double-diamond pup.

We sketched designs on paper and did some cutting to figure out how it might assemble. Early prototypes:

 

Then we drew up the designs in Illustrator, tweaked them a bit, and cut them out on the plasma cutter. I’ve done that enough times that the whole process went smoothly. Playing with the cut profiles for AJ’s section so we could use a single cut line for two parts took a bit of manual adjustment of cut paths, but they still all came out on the first try.

 

We sanded away the dross, then hand-cut the slots, as I didn’t trust the plasma to make the slot straight and to size. They didn’t come out perfectly even by hand, but they fit well enough.

 

After cleaning up the parts, I sandblasted them to remove the mill scale and get a consistent surface finish. I added another small slot in the forehead piece to have it sit on the body–that was drilled out and cleaned up with a rotary tool.

Then AJ and I spent some time playing with surface textures. A small grinding stone, a HSS burr, a wire brush, and an an artistic eye transformed the dull finish into something more detailed. Overall, we’re quite happy with the results!

 

The cost breakdown covers how I would actually make this for production: send it to a place that does metal cutting all day, every day. Their prices make anything other than needing it literally same day hard to compete. I chose SendCutSend because it is easy to quote, but there are plenty of options in town that are competitive.

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	Steel, cut	$3.30	SendCutSend	2	$6.60
Labor	Artist	$20/hr	Indeed	1 hr	$20
	Prototyping Engineer	$60/hr	OoI rate	2 hr	$120
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	15%	Rockler	–	$22
	Quality Control	$17/hr	Indeed	.25 hr	$4.25
Design	Engineering and Development	$60/hr	OoI	1 hr	$60
	Iterations	1

First two articles total: $232.85
Per article thereafter: $15.50