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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Here is a picture of my clean workspace:

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