In this assignment, despite never having used the water jet cutter before, I wanted to challenge myself and went for the intermediate level.
I came up with a really good idea from the beginning of modifying the diamond shape into a sword, as the edges of the sword can be masked by the diamond shape, allowing me to maintain the required dimensions. In order to design this, I used adobe illustrator, chose a picture from a sword, made it a vector file, and masked it using the diamond shape.
Once my file was ready I went to the water jet to cut it. Here I had some issues at first in order to set the machine up, but with the help of a lab assistant, we managed to make it work and I was able to cut two copies of the sword.
Now that I had the swords cut it was time to post-process them. For this, I started by sand blasting the swords, which already made them look extremely better, with a greater shininess (although in the image it cannot be appreciated very well).
Next, I used a metal file to sand the top and side edges of the sword, in order to have even surfaces everywhere. However, I did not sand the bottom part, as I really liked how the cuts looked there.
Once this was done I went for the spray painting. In order to give it a more realistic look I decided that I would leave the blade of the sword with the natural metal color, so I only spray painted the bottom, using brown paint to make it look as realistic as possible. I had some trouble during this step as I did it too early. I was planning on using the wire brush to finalize the blade, but when I tried to do this with the spray paint barely dry, part of it went away. Therefore, I finished using the wire brush for the blade, and then I re-spray painted the bottom part. Although I had to repaint the swords, I was happy with the result of the blade and how realistic the wire brushing made it look.
After having waited another hour for the spray paint to dry on both sides, the swords were finally ready.
As always, I cleaned my workspace afterwards!
The cost of this object includes costs of raw materials, labor, and machine time.
Raw materials:
- 1ft x 1ft of 1/8” aluminum sheet – $16.99
- Brown spray paint – $7.98
- Total costs: 16.99 + 7.98 = $24.97
Cost of labour:
- 6 hours – $17 per hour
- Total costs: 17 x 6 = $102
Machine time:
- 2 hours of water jet cutter – $12 per hour rental
- 1 hour of sand blasting – $82 per 4 hours
- Total costs: $44.5
Total cost of swords: 24.97 + 102 + 44.5 = $171.47
