Sigh, I have come to the realization that I am not the neatest of workers. Will I complete my project and clean up afterwards? Yes. Will I look like I ran through a color powder festival in the process? …Also yes. But we will get to that.

My struggle with this homework, and most others, is that I am frankly too ambitious but lack the skill needed to execute my visions neatly. I wanted to cut out a high-resolution image of my island with my plasma cutter, but about three times, because of my incorrectly formatted Adobe file, the plasma cutter malfunctioned and refused to print it. Thus, I had to opt for a more rugged sketch of my island that, after being cut, had an uncanny resemblance to a chili pepper.

When it came to post-processing my cutting, here are the steps that I followed:

1) I angle grinded the cutout until it had no bits of metal along the edges. I also ground the edges to be smoother and made the surface an unformed texture.

2) I went over the stubborn and hard-to-reach interior corners with a file. Admittedly, the files were still a bit too big to get into the troublesome edges, so the interior was not perfectly smooth.

3) I used the sand blaster to smooth out the difficult interiors and rugged surface. Although it took me a while to realize the machine had any effect, after nearly an hour of blasting, I can confirm that it does a little.

Now here is where I messed up. I was just about to powder coat everything and be done with it; however, I said no, I will just do a few simple stripes similar to my flag. In my local dialect, “Who tell she do dat!?”

4) Albeit satisfying when I figured out how to do it, masking with the tape, spray painting, and waiting for the paint to dry repeatedly was painstaking. I masked the side with tape and alternated where it was covered based on the color of stripe I was painting.

5) At this point, I was excited to use the powder coater. Little did I know how sensitive the trigger was, so I kept getting the powder on me as I changed the colors. I used a dark green and a lime green as well as black in an attempt to create dimension in the piece. Unfortunately, also in certain places, the powder coating refused to stick to my diamond. I could not figure out why this was happening.

6) I was wisely cautioned that I could not put it in the oven with the tape, so I used tweezers to remove it. My biggest disappointment was that some powder got on the stripes, and the powder was too delicate, unbaked to tamper with the design at all, so smudges of green appeared on my stripes. When done baking the powder coating was uneven. The more I looked at it, the more I considered redoing my powder coating, but ultimately decided against it due to time constrains.

7) Regardless, I gave them a final spray coating of clear polish, and she was complete. The spray coating also looked uneven when dry, so in hindsight I would skip that step.

Cost analysis:

– Steel Slab = $20
– Plasma cutter rental = $100/hr
– Angle grinder rental = $30/hr
– File = $9.00
– Sand blaster rental = $120/hr
– Masking tape = $4.00
– Spray paint (4) = 6 * 4 = $24.00
– Powder coating powders (3) = 10 * 3 = $30
– Powder coating apparatus/equipment rental = $90/hr

Estimated total = $423.00

Quite expensive, so I can see why companies up their prices with post-processed materials. It actually costs them a lot, and it makes whatever the product is 10x more visually appealing.