120 Parts, Zero Warping: How I Build Giant Metal Art With MetalFab

Key Takeaways

• The Scale: Six Radiolarian sculptures require 120 complex 3D metal spikes.
• The Precision: Intricate cuts came out with no heat distortion and very little dross.
• The Workflow: Clean flat patterns moved directly into 120-degree folding and airtight laser welding.

My name is Jon Sarriugarte. I’m a metal artist and fabricator in Oakland, California, and I lead Empire of Dirt, a collective that has spent decades bringing art, engineering, and performance together.

At Open Sauce, my crew, Empire of Dirt, brought our mechanical art to the festival and offered visitors a preview of Radiolarian, a series of monumental sculptures inspired by the microscopic skeletons of radiolarian plankton. Now we’re preparing the work for the Black Rock Desert.

The finished sculptures are meant to feel enormous and otherworldly. But inside my shop, the project comes down to something much more exact: 120 intricate sheet-metal parts that all need to cut cleanly, fold correctly, weld tightly, and survive the next stage of fabrication.

This is the story of how I brought xTool MetalFab into that process—and why, after seeing what the first machine could do, I bought a second one.

Before Six Sculptures Could Stand, 120 Parts Had to Fit

Large-scale metal art leaves very little room for small errors.

Each spike for Radiolarian begins as a complex flat pattern. After cutting, the metal has to fold along 120-degree angles so its edges meet precisely. Those edges then need to be welded into an airtight seam before the spike can be expanded in a furnace.

Every stage depends on the one before it.

If cutting introduces heat distortion, the fold can shift. If heavy dross is left along the edge, the parts need more cleanup before they can meet. If the geometry is even slightly off, the weld may require more adjustment—and an airtight form becomes harder to achieve.

That might be manageable on a single experimental piece. Across 120 parts, however, every extra correction becomes part of the production schedule. For a metal art business, the challenge is not only creating an ambitious design. It is finding a way to build that design repeatedly without allowing small inconsistencies to multiply.

My Metal Art Business Needed Repeatability, Not Just a Bigger Tool

I have spent years working in metal fabrication and building large mechanical and sculptural pieces. The creative idea was not the bottleneck. The challenge was translating complicated digital geometry into physical sheet-metal parts with the consistency the project required.

I needed an in-house process that could produce intricate flat patterns accurately, without creating more grinding, correction, and frustration at the next stage.

Speed mattered, especially during late nights in the shop. But speed alone would not solve the problem. A fast cut that left warped metal or rough edges would simply move the lost time somewhere else.

The real goal was a cleaner chain of work:

CNC cut → fold → tack → laser weld → furnace expansion

For that chain to work, the first cut had to be right.

Zero Heat Warping Made Every Later Step Easier

I used the MetalFab CNC cutter to produce the intricate flat patterns for the spikes. What stood out was not just that the machine completed the shapes. It was the condition of the metal when the cut was finished.

“Nice and tight. No heat, very accurate. Great machine, perfect for this job." Says Jon

There was no visible heat distortion on the parts and very little dross along the cut edges. The geometry stayed accurate, and the pieces came off the bed ready for the next stage with minimal intervention. I could also work directly at the cutting bed, using a power nibbler to clear scrap and keep the process moving.

That kept my late-night shop hours highly efficient and frustration-free.

Clean cutting was not an isolated machine benefit. It protected everything that came afterward.

From a Flat CNC Cut to an Airtight 3D Spike

Once a pattern was cut, I folded it into its three-dimensional form. Because the CNC geometry stayed accurate, the 120-degree folds landed where they were supposed to, allowing the metal edges to meet cleanly.

From there, I used the xTool 1200W Laser Welder to tack the form in position and then close the seams. The fit-up was tight enough to support a continuous, airtight weld before the spike moved into the furnace.

This is where the full workflow proved its value. The cutter and welder were not solving separate problems. The accurate cut made the fold more predictable; the predictable fold made laser welding easier; and the sealed weld prepared the piece for expansion.

Instead of fighting errors at each stage, I could move one part through a connected process and then repeat it.

The First MetalFab Proved Its Value, So I Bought a Second

The business value of this workflow is not captured by a single cutting-speed claim. It is in the work I no longer have to add between cutting and assembly: less edge cleanup, less correction during folding, and less frustration trying to force imperfect parts into alignment.

It also lets me keep a critical part of the fabrication process in-house. That matters when a project combines unusual geometry with a production run large enough to expose every inconsistency.

After seeing how the first MetalFab performed in my actual workflow, I bought a second one.

For an established metal art business, that was a practical production decision. One machine showed that the process could work. The second gave the shop more capacity to keep building with it.

One Accurate Part Is a Test. Repeating It 120 Times Is the Breakthrough

The most important moment was not simply producing the first good spike. A single part can be adjusted by hand until it works.

The real test was whether the same complicated design could move through cutting, folding, and welding again and again without turning every piece into a new troubleshooting session.

That repeatability is what makes six monumental sculptures possible. From a distance, the completed Radiolarian forms will be experienced as art: structures inspired by microscopic ocean life, enlarged to a scale that people can walk around and encounter in the desert.

Inside the shop, that experience begins with disciplined fabrication—one clean flat pattern, one accurate fold, and one airtight seam at a time.

For me, that is what the right metalworking workflow should do. It should not reduce the ambition of the design to make production easier. It should give the shop a dependable way to build the ambitious design in front of it.

See the MetalFab Workflow in Action

If your metal art business or fabrication shop is ready to bring CNC cutting and laser welding into one connected workflow, explore the xTool MetalFab Laser Welder and CNC Cutter.

You can also book a free product demo to see how MetalFab could fit into your own shop.