15m Industrial Plasma Cutter

Thanks Rod,

It was discussed earlier and I had in my head that for thin material, speed is important so I should try to cut down the weight of the gantry, hence not mounting the plasma. Especially since my gantry is only 1.25m wide, the extra weight of the plasma would be quite a large relative increase.

I have looked at Hypertherm's website and they sell a variety of torch cable lengths so I'm thinking that if the box was half way down the bed, I would only need cable for 6m of travel and this 10.6m torch would do:

www.hypermaxonline.com/Hypertherm-088168...ft-Lead-_p_1054.html

I'm also going to need wiring from my drives, motion control etc. so I'm thinking that I could just have a pc, control box and torch box halfway down and then a power track capable of housing them all.

Well, that sounds like it would work then. One thing I have learnt is you don't need much hardware. Here is a 7i96 with everything you need. I would just add another THCAD to this for ohmic sensing.


So one option would be to mount this and the LAM drivers and their power supplies on the gantry. Say you were going with 70 volts with their system. you could put a torroidal power supply in the middle of the table where your torch lead enters, all you would need to run to the gantry was a 55 volt (approx) AC power lead, the torch and a network cable up to the gantry. The PC could live anywhere within the ethernet 100 metre maximum limit.

When I built my table, all my sensors and switches were mounted on the gantry anyway.

It will be interesting to hear Tommy's thoughts.

Jarman wrote: It was discussed earlier and I had in my head that for thin material, speed is important so I should try to cut down the weight of the gantry, hence not mounting the plasma.

How much does the plasma weigh? If it's a low-power one for thin material it might be surprisingly light.
Not entirely the same thing, but my portable (inverter) arc welder weighs almost nothing.

Looking on eBay I can see one where the whole boxed kit is 11kg, but don't really know what proportion of that is the plasma source.

I was going to go for a Hypertherm XP45

andypugh wrote: How much does the plasma weigh? If it's a low-power one for thin material it might be surprisingly light.

45XP is About 14 kg with a torch on 6 metre lead

A bit too much for a 1.25m gantry I would think.