Hey Guys,

I would like to share here the production process of my plasma cutting homework.

First off, as we all know, the Plasma cutter broke twice a while back, which resulted in many people’s assignments being DELAYED, including mine, and hopefully everyone got a chance to finish it.

The first step in this assignment is to design a graphic and cut it with a plasma cutter.

As for how to operate the Plasma cutter and preprocess the file, the instructions are written in great detail.

The first problem I had was that after setting everything up, the Plasma cutter reported an error and stopped after a momentary cut.

At first I thought it was because my graphic included too many sharp corners, but then realized that the pliers on the Plasma cutter weren’t linking to the metal sheet very well, and when I reattached them, the problem was fixed.

Cutting start!

After cutting I applied 3 post-processing methods, angle grinder, sand blast and spray painting. The most challenging part of this is the process of using an angle grinder, I’m often terrified of things that spin at high speeds, are sharp, and make a shrill noise (outside of an angle grinder such as a chainsaw), and I wonder if anyone else is in a similar situation LOL.

Sand blast is simple, but there is no trick to it too, as the viewing window is dirty, sometimes it is necessary to stop blast open the lid and check it before continuing the work.

The last step is the spray painting, as you can see from the picture my first spray painting failed and I had to sand blast them and re-spray paint them, this step doesn’t take much time but I had to repeat it a couple of times before I got the hang of the spray painting.

Finally, after only a few hours of waiting (to be determined by the instructions on the paint bottle), this assignment is complete.

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	24″ x 36″ metal sheet	$16 /sheet	homedepot	0.1 sheet	$1.6
	Purple Spray Pain	$5.98 /can	homedepot	0.1 can	$0.6
Labor	Plasma Operator	$19.15 /hr	Ziprecruiter	1 hr	$19.15
	Prototyping Engineer (You!)	$38 /hr	Ziprecruiter	1 hr	$38
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	$60 /hr	Plasma Spider	0.5 hr	$30
Design	Engineering and Development	included in the Prototyping Engineer
	Iterations	3 times spray painting, also included in the Materials
Total					$89.35

Aside from the damage to the equipment, this assignment was the smoothest assignment that went on during the semester of doing it, so I didn’t spend an excessive amount of time on this assignment, which massively reduced the projected labor costs, making this assignment a little less expensive than the others. But this is also a reminder that in industrial production, downtime due to broken machine can also cost money, such as maintenance, and personnel on standby.