Back at it!
For this week’s metal cutting and post processing assignment, I decided to make a mountain range. I started by creating my file in Adobe Illustrator, saving it as a .dxf to make cutting easier. I attended the TA training, where I got familiar with the Plasma Cutter, but didn’t have enough time to cut my file. I came back another day and was able to successfully cut my diamonds. I used both male and female toolpaths. The lead-in was quite visible in the first diamond I cut, so I adjusted the lead-in to occur in the middle of the longest side, and make it longer. This worked better. I cut two more diamonds, so I had an extra one as I worked on post-processing, and I could select the two that were the most similar in the end.
Although it might be difficult to see in the picture, the right side of the diamond in the middle isn’t perfectly straight. When I was cutting with a TA we noticed that the interior cut fell vertically and was sticking up after it was cut. When the plasma cutter was going along the side, we decided to stop it so the interior piece wouldn’t damage the machine. We removed the interior piece and continued the plasma cutter, but it resulted in a little unevenness.
Next, I moved on to angle grinding. Below is a before and after photo. I was surprised how drastic the different was, and am very pleased with the result.
I then sand blasted. I didn’t think it was doing anything at first, but once I took my diamonds out I could see a clear difference where the sand blasting had been done. I sand blasted all three of my diamonds.
I then moved on to powder coating. I wanted to do my diamonds a dark green to fit the mountain vibe, but I was only able to find light green, so I went with that. I preheated the oven, sand blasted, then put the diamonds in for 20 minutes. When I was sand blasting I saw that the paperclip was blocking some of the very top of the diamond, so I ended up hanging them all from the other side and doing it again.
All three of the diamonds turned out well. I ended up choosing the one on the left and the bottom (in the third picture). The one on the right was the diamond that had an indent in the edge from the plasma cutter being raised and lowered. I added my steps on the back of the diamonds with tape. Project complete!
I made sure to clean up my workspaces as I went!
Cost Breakdown
Materials:
Labor:
- 4.5 hours at $10 per hour rate – $45
Tools
- Plasma cutter, angle grinder, sand blaster, powder coating components (all kindly provided by the OEDK)
Total Cost: $76.46
This would be significantly cheaper to do a second time because I would have enough steel and powder to reuse.
