So I made another California item…

I promise that I actually didn’t plan to make my project California themed this time. It just kind of happened…

The first thing I tried to cut during Josh and my plasma cutter session with Dr. Wettergreen was the Mark of the Outsider from the Dishonored series.

After two or three attempts, we decided this image was wayyyy too complex for the plasma cutter to cut on the size of scale we wanted. Once I gave up on this image, I needed to come up with something else to plasma cut for the project. At first, I wanted to cut the state of California into the diamond, but I told myself that I wasn’t going to make another California thing this time. Instead, I went to try to cut one of my favorite animals, a penguin. The major challenge with cutting a penguin is that penguins don’t have an immediately distinct outline. I realized this after preparing the whole file and looking at the cut path in white Torchmate. To solve this problem, I tried to make a stencil like image in Illustrator such that the belly and face remained once the machine performed the cut. This took me way too long and way too many uploads to white Torchmate to figure out how to do, but I eventually got there. Once I finally got the file right, I ran the cut, but the plasma cutter just wasn’t quite precise enough for the cut. It was really close, but there were some problems. The lead-ins didn’t work quite right given the small-ish size of the material being cut, and the eyes came out with different sizes for some reason.

After acknowledging that the penguin idea wasn’t going to quite get there, I tried to come up with an animal that would work really well as a silhouette. This is the point where I ended up on a California theme again. I realized that the California walking bear works really well as a silhouette. I quickly prepared an Illustrator file for the walking bear version and cut it. This time my cut worked great! The cut actually came out with a surprisingly high level of detail, especially in the head area. I cut out three diamonds to give me room to mess up on one.

Once I had cut all three diamonds, I went and angle grinded them. Angle grinding served three main purposes: removing the dross, removing the heat marks, and just general cleaning of the metal. Angle grinding was probably my favorite part of the process. It is really satisfying to removing dross with the angle grinder, and the diamond came out really shiny after angle grinding. After angle grinding, I went downstairs and filed the edges of my diamonds. I also rounded the corners so they wouldn’t be quite so sharp.

The final touch that I added to my diamonds was that I polished them with the fiber laser from the laser cutter. I initially intended to sand blast the pieces. However, after conferring with Danny and Fernando, we came to the conclusion that the sand blaster is currently out of operation. Danny gave me the idea of using the fiber laser instead, so I gave it a try. I used settings of 60% power, 60% speed, and 60 frequency to polish my diamonds. The result of the polishing is that the pieces were slightly less shiny that after angle grinding, but they had a consistent level of shininess rather than the all over the place shininess of the angle grind. I stopped after this step because I actually prefer the look of the shiny metal to the spray painted pieces.

Once I was done with post-processing, I set to adding the steps to the back of the pieces. I decided that the most appropriate way to add instructions to the back of the piece was with engineering paper given that this is an ENGI class. I took out a sheet of engineering, laid the diamonds on top of them, then cut matching diamonds out of the paper using a utility knife. I wrote the instructions on the pieces of paper then glued them onto the back of the pieces. In order to ever so slightly limit the California theme in my project I chose the back such that the bears on the front walked toward the right as opposed to the bear on the California flag which walks to the left.

That’s all!

– Nick