Image 2: Breach Logo on Diamond AI file

Now, the vector lines are a bit hard to see in this image, but you can see that there is a circle cutting out around a whole bunch of other stuff. Somehow, I didn’t realize that this circle would cut out and make everything else in the center of the diamond irrelevant. I would end up with a circle inside of a diamond and no cool design. This came up at my plasma cutting training outside of class, which means I didn’t get my diamonds cut with a TA. Very sad stuff. So, I went back to the drawing board. I like this most recent logo of theirs, but its kind of complicated, and I feel like it would just look weird when it got cut out. So I chose a different one. The basis of all Twenty One Pilots logos is this pattern: |-/. So I found a simpler logo, from their album Blurryface. It looks like this:

Image 3: Blurryface Logo

Now this is a lot simpler to cut out. Obviously you still couldn’t have the circle on the outside, but it still looks okay with the three lines.

Image 4: Vector file ready to cut on plasma cutter

So, I made these three lines on my diamond as my final design. I thought that I could skip the circle part and just paint my diamond pretty album colors once it was all done. I kind of wish I could’ve engraved the circle on the metal or something like that, but I’m not entirely sure how to engrave metal.

Once I finished creating my vector file with these rectangles to cut out, I took the file to the plasma cutter and cut out my diamonds. This was a pretty smooth process. To the right I have an image of my diamond ready to cut out on the plasma cutter. I ran a test run to ensure that it would first cut out the inside lines and then cut out the entire diamond after. Also notice in this image that the path for the inside lines starts at the edge, while the path for the diamond has an arc path coming inwards. This will be important later…

Image 5: Cutting out diamonds on plasma cutter

Anyways. I turned on each machine, set up my file, and cut out my diamonds. They came out really well, probably due to the simplicity of the design. I was very happy to have my first two cuts be so similar. To the left is an image of the plasma cutter cutting out my design. I was pretty happy with how the two diamonds came out, as there wasn’t too much dross on them and the logo looked nice. I had one issue with them though, which is related to my earlier comment about the paths. For the outside of the diamond, the plasma cutter cuts very smooth lines because it leads in, so the starting point isn’t on your final cut. For the inner lines, the starting point is on the line I was trying to cut, so the edges of those lines got messed up by the plasma cutter just starting up at that point. I have included an image below so you can see what I am talking about. For the logo, you can see each point where the plasma cutter started, because it created a circular kind of shape on the edge of each line.

Image 6: Imperfections on logo due to plasma cutter start point

On the waterjet, I know you can get around this by having the start of the path be within the shape that you are cutting out. However, I didn’t know how to change this on the plasma cutter, and since both of my diamonds were identical, I did not think this would be solved by cutting out more diamonds. I decided to keep the design how it was and use a file to make these circular ends less ugly.

Once my pieces were cut, I started post processing the metal. Since I am new to post processing metal, I chose the beginner assignment, and used three different methods. I used the angle grinder to clean off the dross, the sand blaster to make the pieces smoother, and spray paint to color the pieces. I wanted to use powder coating since I had never done it before, but I also wanted to layer a few colors on top of each other, so I used spray paint instead.

I started by using the angle grinder outside. This process was pretty straightforward, but took a bit more time than I thought it would. It was hard to smooth down the edges of the diamond from cutting. I used a file as well in this part to get some small annoying pieces off. Below is an image of my pieces on the magnetic block outside.

Image 7: Diamonds on magnetic block after angle grinding

Image 8: Pieces in sandblaster

Finally, I painted my pieces. I wanted to make the pieces look similar to the actual logo, so I started by spray painting the entire diamonds black, like the background of the logo image above.

Image 9: Pieces ready to spray paint

Then, I used red spray paint to add some lines along the diagonally cut line. I wanted to make it look kind of like the above logo (where the diagonal line is red) so I just put red lines in that general direction to match the vibe. I could have done more coats of the red to make it a more solid color, but I like how it came out with just two.

Image 10: Final diamonds

I think the design matches the vibe of the album and the vibe of the band, and I just really like how they look as is, which is why the spray painting job might not look complete. I have included an image of the two pieces.