I was not feeling incredibly creative for this project, so after seeing at least a dozen diamonds with the state of Texas cut out of them, I felt an urge to represent my own home state, New York.
To start out, I made my design in Illustrator using the vectors of US states. I was worried that the narrow part near Westchester (bottom) would be too thin and not cut right, so I edited the image to make it a bit wider. As I’ll get into, though, this didn’t really work in the end.
After designing it, I cut out a copy of my diamond on the plasma cutter. The software didn’t fully recognize my shape so I had to manually set the male and female cuts. These were the results:
It’s a little hard to see in the photos, but the modifications I made weren’t enough, leading to a small bridge cutting across what I guess we can call Manhattan. I tried widening the gap more on the second diamond, but I couldn’t distort it enough to keep it as one shape without making it look weird. So, I decided I would fix it post-processing.
My first post-processing step was using the angle grinder to trim off the high metal from my print. I tried to use the angle grinder to get rid of the bridge, but it wasn’t able to. Regardless, it made my pieces look a lot cleaner.
After this, I went into my second phase of post-processing: sand blasting. I spent a decent amount of time on both, trying get them as clean as possible. Below is a half and half shot of one of my diamonds.
Now, it was time for me to tackle the little bridge at the bottom. First, I went at it with some very small files, but after 10 minutes and little progress I moved on to a jigsaw with a metal blade. I lined it up, and saw that the blade could just barely fit without ruining the rest of my diamond. And with literally one single oscillation, the jigsaw made quick work of it.
After this, I powder coat my two diamonds blue and put them in the oven.
And here’s my final result!
Overall, I really enjoyed this project. One of my goals going into this class was to learn some form of metal working, so I’m really happy I was able to accomplish this.
Costs:
Labor: 5 hours x $12/hour = $60
Total: $62.43
