Success Story

Dick Roberts purchased a 4'x4' machine in 2007. With the small amount of space he has, the CNC machine is the perfect size to create his beautiful pieces of art. Dick built a room at his Florida home to house  the Torchmate CNC machine, and an air-conditioned room off to the side where he can comfortably oversee his work as it is cut.

"I am combining cutting out images with my CNC and then making art with what I cut out.  Something I would like to point out is my pedestals (Gallery 1) that I designed and cut out with my CNC plasma cutting machine.  The silver one is my first one I made and I designed  everything in my computer and then cut it out.  It was just plain cold rolled 11 gauge steel when I finished cutting it out.  I then decided to make a design in it so I took my O/A cutting torch and cut designs in it.  It was a lot of work and took a long time to do it.  The next time I did one (the black one, with the palm tree and beach scene) I decided to make the design in the cut pedestal with the CNC.  I made everything in my CAD program.  It was so much easier and faster.  All I had to do was weld the sides and bottom together.  Everything else was done in the machine.  Another example was my copper leaf spray.  My first one I made was an exercise of learning to braze.  I cut all of the leaves out by hand using an aviation trimmer.  After I cut out all of the leaves I then took my brazing torch and burned the edges of the leaves to give them character.  It took about two days to get the leaves done before assembling them.  I thought there must be a faster way of doing it, so I scanned a leaf and made a dxf file and put it into my CNC machine and cut out the same amount of leaves.  The plasma gave it the burned edge character that I had on the other leaves, and the whole process took twenty minutes to do the same thing it took me two days to do before.  The copper leaf spray on my website is the one I cut out on the Torchmate CNC machine in twenty minutes.  Then I just brazed them onto my branches I made."

http://www.metalartbydickroberts.com