CRMB

What table are you running? How do you like it? Problems? What type of a power source are you running? What is your edge quality? Auto THC or similiar device? What did you pay for the machine? How is your consumables cost?

We are looking at Komatsu and Victory. Shying away from hobbiest level tables (Plasmacam, torchmate, (insert $10k ebay table name here), etc), but may be unjust prejudice if people are running them OK. Machine needs to cut to 1" with better then sever quality.

Thanks!

KFMRC

I have a guy that cuts things for me once it a while. I usually have things done either on a laser or water jet. He has a plasma cam and it works pretty good. The one thing I can see is that its not a machine I would run all day every day. If you were going to run it for a few hours a day I think it would hold up reasonably well. He uses a hypertherm unit and complains about the cost of his consumables. The machine its self is capable of a nice cut and the finish is going to be dependent on the power source and the operator. I guess the biggest issue might be the size of the 1" plate you want to put onto the table. You also need a good ventilation system.

I considered one but its so cheap to have the parts done on a laser and the quality is so much better that its hard to justify. In a pinch I have a flame cutting machine (used to do all my brkts since the later 70's) vertical bandsaw or my cnc mills.

ManBearPig4silly

The real question is how many hrs per day are you going to run the table? We have a torchmate/Hypertherm combo at one shop and a Ican'trememberwhatitis/hypertherm combo our other shop(higher volume). I'll find out what it is for you. It runs reasonably well unmanned in a high volume environment. ie...non stop cutting 60 hrs a week 16g through 1/2in.

The Torchmate setup is at my shop(and I run it alot) and I would def tell you to shy away from them. The customer service is freakin horrible and so is the THC system.
The system itself is just not set up to be highly accurate or reliable in a production envirionment. It wobbles/binds/z-axis nosedives, jumps out of square etc... and so on.

Features I would highly recommend.

THC WITH a breakaway torch head. I do not belive torchmate offers one at this time. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's an absolute must. Nothing worse than paying someone to sit there and watch the machine with their finger of the "feed hold" button all day.

Nesting program with common cut capability.turbonest works fine for us.

big *** quality plasma to cut 1in plate.

If you are cutting a realatively low volume (3-4 hrs a day total including loading sheets) I think a properly setup and maintained torchmate system with a different THC running a highpowered quality plasma would give you decent results without a huge investment.

If you want mad production and the confidence to just leave the table running while you go take a **** I would jump straight into the higher cost setups.

I think our decent table was like 80-100k used. it fits like 6 72x120 sheets.

dave@passenger

Definitely go with HD plasma is you want any kind of edge quality, you are looking at a serious machine to cut 1" clean anyways.

CRMB

Thanks for the feedback guys. We have limited use at the moment, but I'm starting up a plate shop that is going to need to be able to process plate to size & pattern. I would rather buy it once then keep having to trade-up to better equipment like we did with the bending business.

The komatsu has an HD power source with a finger adjusted THC. (Finger comes down, touches off the plate, and then the torch head drops and cuts). The komatsu is about ~60k used that we are eyeing. Water cooled torch, ventilation system, loader, etc.

The victory is about the same new, but it's another $30k for a HD source which I believe are all hypertherm machines. They advertise that they are more of an industrial solution, but honestly they look very similiar to the the high end "hobbyist" torchmate 4 to me...?

How much better is the HD source? I have been back and forth on waterjets for some time... Even at once time putting down a non refundable deposit that we ended up backing out of when the economy turned so harshly... Don't have the money to buy a 6KW laser, so that's not really an option. Max budget is about $100k on this. Is there anything else I should be looking at?

ovlovder

Did I miss the reasons for ruling out laser or water? We have a Trumpf laser that is fantastic, and have been considering adding a waterjet, aside from manual, plasma has been at the bottom or the list.

sdubfid

I have a torchmate 2x2 with hypertherms powermax inverter. It gives excellent cut quality for what it is.

I would definately go with hypertherm hd plasma. You won't find better customer service. Some good ifo on cnczone or cnc-zone. For production hd laser is the cheapest to run I beleive and can equal laser quality and cut thicker.

This is 3/8" with manual thc. Basically the worst setup you can get as I control the piercing and cutting height manually.

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-..._4010696_n.jpg

92TypeR

If you are going to be doing any cutting for the public, I highly recommend looking into waterjet hardware. You will be able to cut a much larger variety of materials to keep the machine running more often. The last thing you want is to have your hardware sit idle, especially since it will be a major capital investment.

We have 4 Flow International waterjets with our own 3-axis hardware, and one on a 6-axis robotic arm, and they have been dead-nuts reliable. The few times I've dealt with their customer service I have come away impressed.

CRMB

Our primary application will be cutting plate to size for customers, so I'm less concerned with edge quality as I am production capability and keeping the cutting costs down. The waterjet although giving a better edge, I think the customers aren't going to be interested in paying for the machine time.

I found a reasonably priced (under $50k) Komatsu KCR-0951 I think we are going to pick up. It's an HD plasma, down draft table and newer CRT/touch screen control system. Here's a vid of the same model machine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IZwRZD6aNA

longevityrep

That's a pretty cool industrial plasma cutting table.....it gives some real good precision cuts

dave@passenger

Looks alright, weird that the pre setter comes comes down before each cut I assume its just safety default and whoever programmed it didn't bypass it (although it is a nice function for thin material, or any material that isn't very flat).

BTW, I sent you a pm.

CRMB

Not sure on the presetter. I would assume you can change that. Debating whether to buy komatsu's cam/nesting solution and also looking at others. Looking at sigmanest and fabriwin. Sigmanest seems to be pretty common - both our laser cutters use it. Fabriwin hooks right into the fabrivision scanner I'm debating purchase of. Any others to check out?

The down draft system is missing the accumulator as the company who previously owned it (not kidding), blasted the crap out the side of the building towards their neighbor. Not sure what we are going to do there.

We take delivery next friday.

CRMB

A few updates and thoughts on this process.

The thing cut's better then we thought it would. Here you can see plasma versus laser. The bottom is laser. The top is high def plasma. That's 3/8" plate @ 30 ipm on the plasma. Not sure on the laser's settings, but it was cut on a trumpf 3000 watt machine. Although the plasma gives an apparent better edge quality on the outside and inside of parts, small holes are not very cylindrical and require subsequent machining. Very little dross generated on the part. Just some blow away with pierces.



Some LS1 Flanges



Grounding is a serious problem with these high-definition machines. We ended up digging a 30 foot trench and encasing 4/0 bare cable in concrete to get rid of some of the issues we were having. The ground had to be within 5 feet of the machine. Definitely a consideration if you are putting the machine in the middle of a building.

Tolerances seem to be pretty good. We are averaging about +/- 0.005. Kerf width is about 0.036. Consumable life blows. 100-150 pierces and the consumables have to be replaced. These machines run oxygen or nitrogen (no air).

locash

So, if you were to do it over again, would you still buy the same type of machine?

ManBearPig4silly

Cuts look pretty good. can still see the angle of the cut a little bit. Better than either of our non hi-def tables can do for sure.

CRMB

I would buy a komatsu for sure. They have incredible customer service and the machine is a rock. A lot of the problems we've had are from complete and utter inexperience in this field. It's not just something you can park and go.

Here's a shot of the taper. This is mostly a derivative of the consumable and operator setup paramters. You can get near 0 to 1.5 deg if you are good. We are not however and we are still dialing away.



Here's a shot of the slag you get. This is more operator setup than anything else. Our first cuts were embarrassingly bad. You can knock this crap off with a slag hammer in about a minute or two.

CRMB

Video of cutting LS1 Flange. 3/8" 30 ipm hrs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv-onSQFDc8

sdubfid

I think somethings not quite right if your setup is hd. Your consumables should be lasting way longer and you should have little to no dross in my opinion.
My $1000 conventional hypertherm plasma setup leaves about that amount of dross and consumables last 4 times longer even though I control the height manually. I'm running 32ipm on 3/8" steel.

I'm sure you will get it all figured out, I had to do lots of trial and error when I first got my machine setup.

CRMB

On the consumables:

We were able to get our pierces to roughly ~600-800 per set now. Water contamination of the nozzle was part of the problem (water cooled torch), our thc wasn't working quite right - the optical sensor in the offset height adjustment needed to be replaced and our settings were (and still) probably arent quite right now. According to centricut - they average 1000-1400 pierces with our setup. So moving in the right direction I guess.

We're going to be trying some stainless next week. Should be an expensive day of testing. Bleh.

ej1 rep

this thread is awesome, our shop will be getting a plasma table in a couple months!
I still need to learn about it because it is new to me. When I know more I will post it in here. those cuts look good.

dave@passenger

Do you have a time saver to run the parts through afterwards?

CRMB

Dave, what is a time saver?

Anyone running a vacuum lift? Looking for something like this with a 1000lb capacity. Likes / Dislikes?

http://cgi.ebay.com/Anver-Mechanical...item1e5eda0ac7

The manually loading and unloading of 800-1000lb 5 x 10 plates with a forklift blows. Getting them square is a bastard. We ran 3 5x10 plates today and getting those plates on the machine wasn't fun.

dave@passenger

Adam, a Timesaver is kinda like a drum sander, but for metal. It is perfect for removing slag and scale from material. We don't have one in our shop but one of our stainless flatbar suppliers does and we have them run the bar through to remove the scale before we receive the bar to increase our tool life (we only have machining centers here, no burning equipment).

You can pick them up for anywhere between 3-30k used. And really are a time saver (no pun intended) for jobs like what you are doing there. You can also put different belts on to polish the material (an extra service you can offer).

There are probably a bunch on ebay, I think one would be a perfect piece of support equipment for your new table.


On a slight side note, I am curious if you would get better consumable life if you ground the scale off of the material before cutting your profiles...

EGJDM

Look at woods power grip we have on of there vac lifts for loading material on my waterjet. It works really well ours is good to lift over 1200lbs. We use ours usually for loading and unloading granite and quartz we cut. It just has a small vac pump that we mounted on a boom we fabricated for our forklift. We have also used it to load pieces of 4" and 5" of steel.

this is the unit we have:

http://www.powrgrip.com/cgi-bin/powrgrip/MT8HV11.html

CRMB

Nice. I like how it says it has a warning buzzer when it loses vacuum. Any problems with the unit? Do you recall what you paid for it?

Dave, I'll look into one of those units, thanks for the tip. I know the lasers are really sensitive to plate quality, and I'm definitely seeing a difference with different plate suppliers as well - so I'm not sure if its the surface quality that is important or just the overall the quality of the steel. One of the plates we cut earlier cut like butter but looked like crap when we loaded it.