Happy St. Patrick's Day! Plasma Cut Metal Shamrock

[mccutter]

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Plasma Cut Metal Shamrock

I needed to test my recently repaired Hobart AirForce 250ci plasma cutter. It needed the torch air hose replaced and I'll post separately on that at a later date. Grabbed a piece of scrap sheet steel from the resource pile and said to myself "I should cut out a shamrock in honor of St. Paddy's Day and my Irish heritage!"

My freehand attempts at drawing a shamrock just looked too dorky so I made a template to trace out the leaf halves along center guide lines. After an adjustment in leaf width, I came up with an acceptably appearing (to me) shamrock.

I wasn't initially thinking the stamped Dell logo on the re-purposed computer side panel was to be a factor in design but in hindsight, I could have incorporated it into the shamrock horizontally. I've had a couple Dell computers over the years and in fact, I'm typing this on a 13yo "updated" Optiplex. But I wouldn't call myself a fanboi.

Dell DOES have facilities in Ireland so maybe I'll make another one and offer it up on ebay.ie for some rich Irish boy to give me lots of money for... But then I'm sure someone with a plasma table could pump out a dozen in the time it took me to do just one.

Anyhow, the plasma worked great and I think I did better than I expected cutting freehand once I got "warmed up". I cut one leaf at a time on my portable "welding table" (a re-purposed front-end alignment stand to make adjustments to a car up on the rack). There was minimal dross and only one occasion where the cut got hot enough to set the paint alight.

After gently grinding then flapping then filing the edges where needed, I got them so they were richard-rubbingly-smooth. Then I bent little legs to make it freestanding.

After wiping with denatured, I thought I might try a can of green paint that had been sitting on the shelf for 10 years. Ok, nothing. Swapped tips with another can and it sprayed like a dream.

All told, I probably spent an hour on the shamrock, start-to-finish. After displaying it today and tomorrow, it will go on the shelf with the rest of my metal sculptures.

[JohnBoy]

Worked there for a summer in college doing pc build validation. Was a great company to work for.

They closed the assembly plant a few years after that but still employing a whole lot of people here today and a bunch are in assembly again in EMC which they acquired around 10 years ago.


But no I can't see there being much demand for branded shamrocks

[Tim KS]

The pastor at church this morning, on his way out, said, "It's St. Patrick's day, and if you have craving for a green beer today, go ahead and knock yourself out."

[astronut]

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

[dubby]

Looks good to me. Been too wet here to do anything productive, or even just mildly entertaining.