Cookin with gas | ENGI 210: Prototyping and Fabrication

For this project, as it is my first time metal working, I decided to go as simple as possible and went with some basic geometries, choosing a symbol I liked and adding a hole at the top so as to make it like a pendant.

The first step was creating the AI file and then loading it up to the plasma cutter to create the two triangles for this project and after some struggles with illustrator, these two were made.

As you can see, the metal piece was very rough due to the nature of plasma cutting and similar thermal cutting and joining methods, we get some slag and build up which makes the piece ugly. As such, the next few steps were angle grinding (forgot to picture) and dremeling for the build-up inside which the angle grinder couldn’t get into. unfortunately, the plasma cutter sucks so there are some parts that were cut into unevenly due to the nature of the symbol where the wings were too close to the blood drop.

After these clean-up steps, the final step would be to powder coat and in order to get better adhesion and application, it is best to get a clean surface and as such, I removed the topmost layer of what seemed to be oxide through sandblasting.

After this step, I powder coated the piece outside using the airgun to spray on black powder coat. My original plan was to try and potentially do a red layer with a black X crossed out near the top but the red pigments available did not particularly please me so I just went with black.

Afterwards, I took the piece and put it into the powder coat oven and let it sit for 20 minutes.

Horrible photo of them cookin

Afterwards, I removed the triangles and let them cool down before writing out the post processing steps I used to create this piece.

In total, I used the plasma cutter, angle grinder, Dremel, sandblaster, and powder coater.

After finishing, not sure where the white paint on the magnet came from as photo was a bit after I had used it.

Cost analysis:

1/8″ 4×4′ Steel – $10 bucks
Tools: (free bc oedk)
1. Plasma cutter – Unsure of model, but a cheap one can cost $528, one we used is probably a few thou.
2. angle grinder – If from milwaukee – $84.33 for cheap
3. illustrator app – $34.49
4. dremel – $65
Powder Coating: Eastwood black texture powder coat $14.99
Labor:$15/hr * 3 = $45

Total cost: Excluding expensive tools: $69.99

With tools, $781.81 + a few thousand depending on what plasma cutter you use, one I referenced is 100% less sophisticated than the OEDK one. So my wallet hurts thinking about that ;-;