A Plasma Cutter as a Delicate Sculpting Tool

April 23, 2015 2:40 PM

Artist Cal Lane uses an industrial plasma-cutter (called a "blowtorch" in the links) to convert salvaged metal into lacy and delicate sculptures. [via]

Here is a French video showing stills of her creating some of her pieces.

Favorites include:
- Domesticated Turf
- Sweet Crude
- Car Bombing

posted by quin (11 comments total)

I love and hate things like this. I love the creativity. I love seeing how someone looks at things completely differently than I do.

The part I hate is my jealousy of his talent.

Great stuff, thanks for posting!
posted by dfm500 at 3:04 PM on April 23, 2015

The part I hate is my jealousy of his talent.

Quick gender correction: I believe it's her talent. Particularly worth correcting because gender seems to be explicitly brought into the work, according to the second link.
posted by goodglovin77 at 3:50 PM on April 23, 2015

On second thought, you might have been referring to a hypothetical "like this" scenario; if so, apologies for the unneeded!
posted by goodglovin77 at 3:51 PM on April 23, 2015

No, I was careless in what I wrote. The correction is fair.

And the jealousy is still there, regardless of gender.
posted by dfm500 at 3:59 PM on April 23, 2015

This is absolutely gorgeous, and just makes me that much more excited to get my hands on the communal laser cutter when it goes back online this weekend.
posted by clarknova at 4:08 PM on April 23, 2015

clarknova: is it a hack/makerspace? I know the pain of waiting for a busted laser to be corrected.
posted by quin at 4:17 PM on April 23, 2015

We have one in the shop and I've been wanting to learn how to use it. This is a great inspiration to make that happen. Some of the pieces were really nice and would make for beautiful interplays of light and shadow.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:48 PM on April 23, 2015

Pieces like this would make a wonderful fender guard for an open fireplace.
posted by adamvasco at 5:21 PM on April 23, 2015

Fantastic. I particularly love how some items related to things like oil and ammunition have been turned into beauty.
posted by Bovine Love at 5:50 PM on April 23, 2015

Plasma cutters are amazing to work with, slicing through heavy gauge steel like butter gives a strange sense of wonderful power.
posted by specialk420 at 11:33 PM on April 23, 2015

clarknova: is it a hack/makerspace? I know the pain of waiting for a busted laser to be corrected.

Yep. Sucks, don't it.

I especially hate it when people abuse the equipment for commercial purposes. No, the space's laser cutter is NOT a substittue hand chisel for you to produce thirty chessboards to sell at the RenFaire.

Fucker.


We have one in the shop and I've been wanting to learn how to use it. This is a great inspiration to make that happen. Some of the pieces were really nice and would make for beautiful interplays of light and shadow.

Protip: Get a copy of Silhouette Studio or CraftRobo, which is really the same software. You want the paid version, because it outputs SVG. Which you can turn to compliant DXF using Illustrator (but not Inkscape because it secretly sucks). I have yet to discover a better vector tracing tool. It's practically cheating.
posted by clarknova at 12:30 PM on April 24, 2015