In Illustrator, I added the letter ‘e’ in a serif font, vectorized the text, then used the Pathfinder tool to subtract it from the fill of the diamond. I exported my .ai file as an svg.
I woke up bright and early on a Wednesday to attend the 9:00 am plasma cutter workshop with our TA Isa. We went through turning on the plasma cutter, and we cut a Texas out of aluminum as a demo. The trouble started when we imported our diamond files into Torchmate.EDU. The program had difficulty processing the internal cuts, turning our simple designs into spider webs of pixels. We were able to solve the issue by re-exporting our files as DXF. I did a dry run to ensure there was adequate space for my design, then cut the metal with the laser. After fishing out my first piece using the giant glove, I repositioned the laser, did a second dry run, and then cut my second piece.
I chose not to powder-coat my pieces because I wanted them to visibly read as metal. I’ve never worked with metal before, and it has always seemed so inaccessible to me. When working with cool materials, I find their natural textures interesting and I want to let it shine through!
No coloring meant I had to work harder to get out any imperfections in the metal, since it wouldn’t be covered by a powder coat or spray paint. First, I used the edge grinder to remove the harsh excess metal. Then I sandblasted the pieces to smooth out the travel marks made by the edge grinder. I repeated these two steps a total of four times to get my pieces as smooth as possible. I was not able to get the pieces smoother since the edge grinder had begun to take a significant amount of material away, making the points unstable and causing black char marks due to the heat burning through the now thin metal.
I still wanted to make my pieces shinier, so I looked through old blog posts to find a method. A previous student used metal polish, but when I asked the OEDK did not have any. Professor Bisesti then recommended an unconventional method: toothpaste. The aluminum oxide in white, non-gel toothpaste acts as a fine abrasive particle that can buff out impurities in metal. I took my metal diamonds on a field trip to my quad bathroom where I used a soft towel and my roommate’s toothpaste to polish. While they appeared smoother after, I think polish would be necessary to achieve the finish I want. None the less, I had two metal ‘e’s.
Cost Estimation:
1/30th of a 24″x36″ metal sheet = $0.48
2 hours of labor at $15 per hour = $30
Total = $30.48
A clean edge grinder!
