Metal and Acrylic TL Logo

Atrbyg

United States513 Posts

December 08 2012 01:13 GMT

My high school recently got an abrasive waterjet machine for the machining lab and what better way to make use of this new tool than to create a sick TeamLiquid Logo out of metal. The machine is surprisingly simple to use; all you need to do is get a design of what you want the machine to cut and then convert it to the correct file format. To actually draw the TeamLiquid Logo, I found a high resolution image on this amazing site called google and simple put the image into Autodesk Inventor. You then just simply need to trace over the image to create a sketch by simply tracing over the image using the line and arc tools.

The actual cutting process by the machine is really quick. My design of the Teamliquid Logo, which is approximately 3 by 2.5 inches in size took only 5 minutes to cut out. I wish i could show you a picture of the Logo after it emerges from the machine, but I did not take a picture of it. Hopefully the multitude of pictures I have of the end product more than make up for this. :D

The end product from the water jet is really cool, but it requires some work so that all the water marks and rough edges can be made smooth. For the face of the Logo I used a Scotch Brite to gently chew away the defects on the top layer and used a good, old filer for the edges.

A metal logo by itself looks cool, but I felt that it needed something more so I got the idea of laser cutting a piece of colored acrylic to glue onto the back of the metal, so that the color of the acrylic could shine through the mane, eye, and nostril of the horse. (I know this is hard to picture without an image, but just bear with me till the end.)

I really wanted a blue color to fit with the colors of TeamLiquid, but I could only get my hands on green in the shop so that's what color I ended up using. Once I had the piece, I glued it onto the back of the metal part and after a few hours of waiting for the piece to dry (and a couple more to get glue off the piece, because I put the glue too close to the edges so it got squeezed out), I had my epic TeamLiquid Logo.

Now for some Pictures: (Warning: Large Images)
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