Another week, another project in EDES210. This week, we used the plasma cutter to cut designs into stainless steel diamonds, and then do three steps of post-processing. Here is the process from start to finish!

My Illustrator file.

The plasma-cut step was completed in office hours with Isabella Soto. Thanks, Isa! James and I learned to use the plasma cutter, and I decided to angle-grind immediately after this step, so I unfortunately don’t have any photos of the laser cutting or angle grinding due to wanting to keep my phone away from a) the nasty plasma cutter water and b) the magnetic shavings the angle grinder was creating in droves.

My steel diamonds after angle grinding. Can you tell what the design is yet?

Here’s the parts after angle grinding, though – I had some pretty nasty burrs, so this was a huge improvement. Next, I decided to sandblast, but I was not expecting how slow it would be. It’s a good thing I removed so much material with my design!

The finish after a long time sandblasting!

I was rotating through the sandblaster with James and Sammy, so this took a while. We got it done, though! Next up was powder-coating.

Powder-coated.

At this point, the finish looked very even and consistent. I was satisfied enough to move onto curing the powder-coat in the oven, which I then did.

Curing my diamonds!

We can see the start of a hidden unevenness in the finish here. In addition, in having others move in and out of the oven, my pieces got knocked around a little, which did not help this process. Nevertheless, I persisted, and…

The final product!

Hey, it’s not too bad! This was a good learning experience that the translucent powder coats are hard to get even and even harder to tell when they’re even, as the powder does not start off translucent. You should be able to tell what design i went for by now! Even though the powder-coating is not perfect, I’m very proud of my sandblasting and angle grinding steps, and the result is not bad at all. I look forward to applying these skills for the midterm project!

As for the photo of the clean wet lab, I was unfortunately unable to grab one as Eclipse unceremoniously kicked us out to make carbon composite tubes of some sort. Rest assured, when I left the wet lab, I had taken all of my materials with me and others’ projects were the only thing left in the oven. As for the powder-coating station, people were continuously working in to get their powder-coating done and using the same powder as I was, so I was unable to cleanup.

Total cost breakdown

Materials: 1’x2′ 5mm stainless steel = $30.72 from MetalsDepot. I used 36in^2, so = 0.125*30.72 = $3.84

Sand/abrasive: reusable. $0.

Powder-coat: ~$10/can * 10% used = $1.

Labor: 3hr = $30

Machine time: 3hr = $30

Total: $64.84