Metals

After working on plastics on Wednesday we moved on to looking at metals on Thursday. We worked with aluminium which is very soft and easy to bend.

Again we were each given a sheet of the material to mark with a line for cutting. This time however we marked it with a hard point scriber as the machines that we were going to be using would have removed the protective sheeting and any pen line made on it.

I then cut the metal using a machine called a guillotine tread. To use this machine you have push down leaver with your foot and apply quite a lot of force to get the blade to go down with a clean cut.

Guillotine tread

I sanded down my pieces of metal with sandpaper to ensure the edges weren’t sharp and I then had a go at folding my metal using a roller.

Roller

For this I kept the protective sheet on so that it wouldn’t leave marks on the metal.

Afterwards I used a machine called a grit blaster which takes away the shine off the surface of the metal and can create patterns by covering certain areas of the surface with masking tape. The machine fires a fine dust onto the metal with a lot of force and basically erodes away the surface of the aluminium.

Grit blaster

Shiny surface under the masking tape

Finally, I used a machine called a box folder to fold my metal at an angle rather than rolling it like the roller does.

Folded aluminium piece

Box folder