After looking at the plasma cut diamond examples in class, I decided I wanted to make diamonds with cutouts. One summer a few years ago, a friend and I decided to try and make 1,000 paper cranes of various sizes. Since then it has been the one piece of origami that I can consistently make. Because of this, I figured it would be fun to try and recreate the origami crane on the plasma cutter. I began by finding a picture of a paper crane and outlining it in Adobe Illustrator.
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Crane Image
With Madison’s help, we converted the file to DXF and plasma cut the shape. Because I wanted to keep both the male and female part cutouts I had to cut four times to get all four pieces whole.
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Pieces after plasma cutting
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Plasma Cutter in action
After the parts had been cut, I used the handheld grinder to remove the dross. Next I hand-filed the pieces to ensure the edges were smooth and the cranes would fit into their spaces inside the diamonds.
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Before grinding
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After grinding
Next I moved on to sandblasting. I ended up sand blasting all of my pieces twice to ensure a smooth and uniform look since I knew I wanted to preserve the raw metal in some parts.
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Sandblasted vs unprocessed
After I got the finish that I liked, I moved on to creating vinyl stickers to cover the raw metal portions while I spray painted. I downloaded cloud drawings in adobe illustrator and turned them into vector files to vinyl cut. Once the stickers were out of the machine I separated them so I could place them exactly where I wanted. I stuck the stickers on then headed to spray paint them.
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Stickers
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Ready for paint!
I found the perfect sky blue but unfortunately I was about halfway through the second diamond when the color ran out. I grabbed a different darker blue and a white to try and mix the color to match but it is still a bit darker. While I was mixing in the white I liked the hazy sort of effect it added to the blue color so I did a very light spray on the original sky blue diamond as well. I waited a few minutes for the paint to get tacky then I removed the stickers to reveal the raw metal. After the paint had dried I added a protective clear coat over the top of the diamonds. While the paint was drying I drew “fold” lines with a sharpie onto the origami cranes and sprayed them with a clear coat as well. The final step was to flip over the diamonds and do a uniform coat of blue on the back.
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Final Pieces!
Here is a picture of my clean workspace:
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Clean Workspace
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Clean Workspace after filing
Cost Type | Cost | Price | Source | Quantity | Total |
Materials | Aluminium Sheet, 12×12” | $11.47 | HomeDepot.com | 1 sheet | $11.47 |
Spray Paint | $5.98/can | HomeDepot.com | 2 cans | $11.96 | |
Sharpie | $1.99/ 2 pc | Target.com | ½ pack | $0.99 | |
Labor | Machine Shop Operator | $22.61/ hr | ZipRecruiter.com | 1 hr | $22.61 |
Prototyping Engineer | $15/hr | Personal Wage | 4 hrs | $60 | |
Overhead | Facility Cost (Machine Time) | $0.15/ kw/hr | hypertherm.com
MarketWatch.com |
¼ hr | $0.03 |
Quality Control | $19.88/hr | ZipRecruiter.com | N/A | $0 | |
Total Price | $107.06 |