3.5X1.5 Meters cnc plasma cutter

@Tom I see you are still on the cola and off the coffee

as off todays Halooween 3D work
supperfast 3D prints

Tom you are a machine. i tried to get some work done on mine this week but crashed and burned yesterday and got nothing accomplished. i did manage to pick up some paint and more material today.the way things are sitting now for me i need more structure in my frame. another set of casters in the middle are a must and i am sure the cross sections will beef things up once i get those in. i did pick up a refurbished DELL 780 to mess around with Linux but have not had time to mess with it yet. it does have a printer port and a serial port with plenty of USB ports.

i wish i had more time for my project but i still need the regular job to keep the lights on not to mention the weather dropped like 20 degrees yesterday and feels like winter is not far off. i'm running out of warm weather and might need to start winterizing the shop so i can at least try to heat it when it gets really cold

i feel like i'm moving in slow motion watching you go

i never gave a 4th axis a thought for plasma but that is something not as common to have available to you which makes it a plus. i could probably get some things done with it since i have some more travel on my Z axis than most. i've seen weldments needing work after bending and welding so the need to have some reach down inside of things was something i was thinking about from the beginning. travel on my Z axis is about 10 inches max but that might be enough to get some kind of rotary work under? something to think about.

when dealing with shafts or tubes a chuck on one end and some sort of center on the other end is one way to hold them. the only other way i can think of for a second option is between two centers with the use of a slotted face plate and a lathe dog to drive the shaft or tube. that might be a little lighter but not as quick when it come to changing parts out. the only other thing i can think of off hand would be use a smaller chuck that grips the ID of the tube rather than the outside so you could keep your chuck as small as possible.

i had a job making industrial pumps and we made some pretty big shafts for those. most were around 16 feet long, we did all of the turning between two dead centers and used 3 steady rests at once since the run out had to be around .0002(english) or better. but before you could do any work on a shaft they would have to have to be center drilled on the ends. we used a fixture to get those started on the ends. we would drive them in a 3 jaw on one end and used the fixture on the other end so we could get a center to hold the end not driven by the chuck ,spot a turn for a steady rest then add a steady rest so we could center the shaft. the fixture used to do this was just a tube with an ID big enough to fit over the size shaft being worked on, the end was closed off with a center in it for the tail stock but it had 4 bolts 90 degrees apart to adjust the shaft so it ran true somewhat. something like this to hold your tube might work but like i said changing the parts out in a production sense would not be very fast.

seems like they best way to over come the weight of the chuck is to just use bigger motors to to get the speeds you need. if not the best solution it's probably the easy way around it.