What Kind of Jobs Can I Do With my Cutting Table - Tips and Tricks with Jim Colt

In this episode, Jim Colt, an industry veteran from Hypertherm, shows us all kind of small parts he can do with his plasma cutting table. Visit https://www.maverickcnc.com/ for more information on all of our plasma cutting tables.

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Video description :

Hi, Jim Colt here with MaverickCNC, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about small shop application. You can see few samples here.
I drew up a part and cut a piece of three-inch steel with holes using all my techniques for plasma cutting and when you actually look at them, the holes look very nice an around. When you cut holes, one of the most important things is the height control of the torch. To work, distance has to be very accurate in order to maintain least amount of tapper in hole. So, what you ideally want when you drill a bolt hole is the bottom of the hole and the top of the hole to be the same size, so the bolt doesn’t wobble too much. If you’re running at its lowest possible power level using the lowest, the correct consumables, an if you use some techniques or if you have a good acceleration, good fluid… those are the key to cutting good hole.
Another thing is, one thing I don’t have in a shop that I’d like to have is press break, I like to be able to bent you know ten gage or quarter inch steel so, there’s some technic you can do without having a press break if you have a CNC plasma cutter. Now, I did program all the outside holes and then did some stiches cuts. I can bend this part by hand, check up to make sure it is nice and square and then weld these corners in.
So, I don’t need to buy the best machine, interestingly enough, it’s much harder to cut thin material with the plasma cutter and get good tolerances and good quality than it is to cut thick material like this piece of one inch steel right here. This very nice cut quality on a one inch, very nice on this twelve-gage steel. But the machine had to go at maybe two hundred, three hundred inches per minute, where in one eight-inch steel, I was probably cutting at about eight to ten inches a minute, eight to ten inches a minute is very easy for CNC machine the stay on track and the do things very accurately, three hundred inches a minute is very difficult for the machine, so you need a machine with good acceleration rates very tight construction and thin material can be done very well, but once again, thin is harder than thick and also produces a little bit more smoke a cutting process. Thin material smoke just blows off the table. When you cut thick material like this at the higher power level, the particles of molted metal then drop enough the bottom a way heavier than air just fall in the bottom of table is a lot less smoke.

You are putting something back together and you just can find a simple part like a washer it goes on it. But I can draw this just from the simplest of CAD drawings, it’s a couple of circles and I can try and cut it in less than a minute. I mean it’s that simple, and it was an actual part, I was replacing a shift cable on my bolt and their stainless-steel washer. When I took the old shift cable out, I looked all over the garage and could not find them anywhere. Then I remember I had a plasma table. When over a minute I had a brand-new stainless-steel washer. You can do, just about anything. This aluminum cutting; not a lot of good way to do it. Plasma does a great job.
Now if you look for absolutely the tightest tolerances on thinness material with absolute perfection in cuts, there’s all the processes: there is the laser cutting systems MaverickCNC parent company Machitech makes laser cutting system, water jet cutting system but the lowest price for purchase point of view an operating cost point of view is plasma. So, plasma is very popular in small shop like my farm shop, or a small company. It’s a great process and its relatively low cost, by far, the lowest cost way the cut steel.
If you have Hypertherm Powermax 45 XP, you can use the marking process. Using our gun on stainless steel and get a pretty good etch like that. But there is etching capability with some plasma cutting system as well. The new MaverickCNC that I put in my farm shop here does have a scribe marker.
So those are some other thing you can do, the rest is up to your imagination.