Hi! Long time no see! Made a pendant! It’s a gift for a friend of mine!

The pendant is a a blank of Grade 5 Titanium, which was waterjet to shape, anozided, and engraved on the mill.

The waterjet was the easiest part, and handled the titanium with no resistance at all. The anodizing, however, was surprisingly difficult. I followed this instructables, which seemed like a straightforward process. However sanding the blanks from their brushed factory finish to a shine was incredibly tedious. Eventually I just settled for “good enough,” which involved a few scraches still remaining and honestly not the best surface finish. The actual process was relatively painless, and resulted in pretty good colors. I did experience a lot of voltage drop in the 9V battery array, so I ended up having to do a lot of testing to figure out what the nicest colors were. I settled on a light gold and a dark blue, which contrasted really well.

The design came from another friend who spent a lot of time creating a pair of drawings that had symbolic meaning while looking cool.

ben's drawings

I then converted the design to a svg, and imported it into fusion360 (what I use for most of my CAM). The engrave feature in fusion has some strange requirements for the path (it seems to need to be closed), so I just used the trace feature instead. It turns out the chamfer bit I was using (supplied by the makerspace) didn’t actually come to a perfect point, but instead a 1mm or so edge.

simple cam

I was initially concerned about how that would make the design look, but in the end I was really happy with it!.