Cut Culture: Abstract Cicada Earrings
Abstract Cicada Earrings
By Nicole Ng, Product Development Intern
Background / Establishing the problem
One of the many applications of the WAZER is that you can create impressive wearable pieces with relatively thin material. However, if you're familiar with piercing the materials, this leaves some frosting on the surface which isn’t a favorable appearance. What if you want to preserve some finish of an existing stock of material? Also, how detailed can you go with your design?
Why Wazer Solution
My approach was to make a whimsical earpiece inspired by this summer’s cicada reappearance, something Lady Gaga would also vibe with. I started with raw, unfinished material and how you can polish it to erase imperfections, but I also will show how I preserved the finish of an existing mirrored aluminum sheet.
This way, the detailing of my jewelry piece will show you that the WAZER can really cut lots of detail and leave the metal intact and the surface unbothered.
Process
I started by having a jewelry design in mind and drew out a dxf from Solidworks. To prevent most of the frosting from ever happening you can increase the distance away from the part that the wazer pierces the material. The time during the piercing occurs is when most of the frosting occurs. This distance is called the lead in distance and can be changed from the add/edit material menu in WAM. Only change the lead length to be longer and the tabs to be smaller, and this lead length depends on the diameter of your frost when piercing through the material. For instance, the original lead length for 0.031 in thick aluminum was 0.026 in, which I increased to 0.2 in after measuring the first pierce frosting diameter (0.12 in was the actual diameter and gave some leeway). Another trick is to manually place these leads so that most of it is located in the metal that is to be cut off from the final piece.
Then came an interesting revelation: how and what should I cover my stock material so that frosting and other imperfections from sand hitting the metal surface is prevented? After trying all types of materials, I came up with some suggestions for preserving the finish one one side.
Masking tape sometimes works if you press down thoroughly, but they could be blown off and balloon as the material is pierced, actually channeling the frosting in certain regions. They also can leave some harsh residue.
If you want the most foolproof way to protect your existing surface finish, I suggest laying some double-sided bond adhesive tape and top it with some thin silicone. Since silicone cuts with the metal simultaneously, it wont blow off, and will consistently protect metal surface from the hard-hitting abrasive along the cut path. This setup is a lot more involved and might not pay off if you must mass produce this jewelry. Cons are it might block the cutting head path.
The most time efficient and effective solution is actually using a sized sheet of UHMW polyethylene adhesive-back film to protect your finish. It takes very little time to install, and mostly blocks the frosting. Clean the surface and apply adhesive to the surface so there's little air bubbles. Really press down the adhesive on areas where the cut outs will be the most detailed.
Depending on if you want to preserve one or both sides of your metallic material, I found these to be helpful:
If your polished side is facing up and is covered, there is a higher chance of frosting and tarnishing the finish, however, there is a lot less deburring to be done and looks cleaner.
If your polished side faces the cutting bed, your surface is more protected from frosting but is vulnerable to a lot of burring.
You can protect both sides of your polished material, but make sure to use relatively thinner material.
For my jewelry, I did a combination of changing my lead in and tab settings in WAM, and covered both sides of my polished and raw material with the polyethylene adhesive for preventing imperfection.
If you start out with raw materials to make your jewelry, you might want to polish it after cutting or want to get rid of imperfections such as frosting, existing scratches, and burring, or maybe you finished preserving your polished surface after cutting but want to touch up. Then comes the option of polishing and finishing.
I highly recommend a satin finish, probably the most apparent one, using an orbital sander from when you start using raw material, and work from coarse to finer grains of sandpaper. With my polish, I started with a 320 and hit my surface again with a 1500 sandpaper. This is good for covering larger surfaces of material, especially when treating raw material.
However, if you want a more brushed finish or want to polish certain parts of your polished material, then using a pneumatic sander is a good option for good sanding control. If you have slight blemishes, then I suggest sanding with the right grain which matches the size of your scratches to get rid of the imperfection. A pneumatic sander is also a good avenue for deburring a lot on a surface time efficiently on raw surface materials.
For deburring these thinner metal materials, you can use a file, sand orbiter, or even fingernails. However, depending on the material you use, you can expect the following:
If your metals are relatively soft (I used aluminum 6061), you can easily file off the burs.
If your metals are harder (stainless steel), you might need to dremel the burrs off for a more finished look.
Some metals are brittle, so when the WAZER water jets along its cut path, the edges might be chipped. There’s not much you can do about this, so I suggest doing some research into materials that aren't so brittle if this poses an issue to your design.
If you are looking to etch text or design on your metallic surface, laser etching on ceramic-sprayed aluminum is a way I etched my logo phrase on some metal tags I made. Of course, the visibility of your laser etching will depend on how easily your metal oxidises, but for jewelry I kept in mind that I want my materials to be relatively light, so I went with aluminum. For this material make sure to use some oxidative material/spray when you do laser etching to get a visible print.