Water depth, slats, and underwater cutting

arcsynapse89
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11 May 2026 11:19 - 11 May 2026 12:10 #346327 by arcsynapse89

Replied by arcsynapse89 on topic Water depth, slats, and underwater cutting

My experience with my industrial CNC plasma table I designed and built is as follows,

I would not recommend a water table for a machine that is used in heavy plate production as slag build up on the slats causes them to need frequent cleaning.
- I tried multiple solutions to remove the top layer of slag but in heavy use it is only temporary.
- In the end we ended up just replacing the slats every couple of months as the labor cost to remove and clean them far out-weighted the cost of replacement.
- When I first built the machine, I incorporated slat mounts into the machine frame but as soon as we started using it for heavy production, we found it very hard to remove the slats to clean them. I rebuilt the slat support mounts and built removeable frames the slats mounted into. We would then crane the thee slat sections out with a forklift every other week to clean out the massive about of metal slag.
- I was lucky enough that a fire hose reel was positioned near the machine to keep the water level topped up, but after I left the company, my replacement foreman experimented with different water level heights and found that for the air pressure of the Hypertherm Powermax 125 we are using, the water does not need to be at the top of the slats to remove the plasma smoke from the air.
- I built a large under-table custom water storage tank and had it hot dipped galvanized. I found it very crucial to have a water storage tank to drain the water so the slag can be shoveled out. I spent many hours some days shoveling out slag into a large recycling bin and in heavy use the slag is heavier that concrete.
- My next table will be a down-draft table as I have seen post on the forum showing how a baffle system can be use to reduce the required air flow suction to safety remove the plasma smoke.
- I brought a refractometer to keep and eye on the plasma water solution concentration, but found that as long as I keep the water level stable and added trace amounts of plasma water table fluid, rust was mostly non-existent
  
  I hope this helps someone as I learnt everything the hard way multple times.