Rods "Spaceship" Scratch built Plasma Cutter build

now you get to feel what i have been feeling the last month or two. it's been -5 C at night here and about 1 or 2 C during the day your weather is what i see in the summer time most of the time.

sounds like an adventure and something to cross off the bucket list to me

machinedude wrote:

now you get to feel what i have been feeling the last month or two. it's been -5 C at night here and about 1 or 2 C during the day your weather is what i see in the summer time most of the time.

sounds like an adventure and something to cross off the bucket list to me

The first time I saw snow was in New Zealand when I turned 50 but we did get up on top of a glacier while we were there after driving through 600 km of rain, hail, sleet and snow to get there.



But it was the welcome the Kiwi's gave me which included waving a spear up my left nostril on my actual birthday that was the most terrifying part.....


Clive has no idea how lucky he was to get out of the country unscathed!

Re the bucket list.
The Automechanika trade show in Shanghai is arguably the largest in the world now, just eclipsing Automechanika Frankfurt and SEMA running third. We are heading over with the AAAA, our industry association (like SEMA). I near sh!t myself when I found out there were over 6000 exhibitors! We have 28 rooms booked in the motel so its a sizeable group, big enough to get to meet the organisers.

My mechanic is coming with me. He's a lot younger than me and I'm sure he suffers from ADHD so it will be a funny trip for sure!

And one of my suppliers is travelling 4 hours to meet me and show us Shanghai one evening so that will be a bit of fun!

Anyway, we rummaged around this arvo and found my lambskin gloves I used to wear when I actually lived in a colder climate where at least we had frosts! No matter how good the car heater was, my hands just froze on the wheel without those gloves!

well cold weather or not you must be doing something right. to have the chance to experience an event like that and travel for work related stuff i would consider a blessing. what ever your doing keep at it it seems to be working well for you

i would probably pass on the spear in the nose deal though and be happy at home

i hope you enjoy the trip and gain some good stories to tell later

Well today was the first time I cut a full 2400 x 1200 sheet since I added a water table.
First observation is that Tommy was right . We made quite a splash around the machine because we don't have sides much higher than the slats. But becasue its only a half sheet table, we need to be able to index the sheet so this is kinda needed. I might look at working out how to add higher sides and keep the ends low for indexing sheets.

Second observation is how much nicer cut quality is. This really surprised me. What little dross that was on the sheet just knocked off to reveal a perfect finish with little effort and no grinding. Much better than cutting over air. Very happy about that.

Third observation is that I really need to add a parking position in Sheetcam to move to the centre of the table after cutting until the air flow finishes.

So a question. What do people use to knock dross off the sheet? Has anyone made a tool? If so what did you come up with?

PS. Plasmac's sheet sever features works really well!

tommylight wrote:

I just throw the parts on the concrete, that usually gets rid of 95 % of the dross.

We have so little dross now with a water table, we were even wondering if the sandblasting as the part gets powder coated would be enough. I think it probably would be...

Today we stopped spotting holes and just cut them and even 6mm holes came out perfect for M5 clearance holes. The 9mm holes for nutserts are also perfect!

tommylight wrote:

I just throw the parts on the concrete, that usually gets rid of 95 % of the dross.

Lol, Tom must be getting into the concrete floor repair industry.

I laid the concrete in my shed at home myself and took great care in preparing to surface to perfection. I just cannot fathom throwing heavy object at it on purpose lol. Although the 60 year old floor at work is fair game.

Off topic but the Yanks have a lot of products for their "garage" floors. Tiles, epoxy finishes, they really know how to create man caves!

That was my mistake. I put my little shed on an existing exterior slab that had a lot of slope on it. Plus its exposed aggregate so if you drop something, you can never find it again. Then not long later I poured a slab behind it to put a 5000 litre rain water tank on in a drought when the council was paying for half of it. The slab is the same width as the shed. I wish I had poured a big slab for the tank and the shed.

There is a concrete flooring product called Lanco that you pour on a floor like custard and it self levels. I have thought of pouring it into the shed to level the floor up 25mm but I was put off because I had so much gear in there and would have done it in sections. Now most of the stuff has been moved to my work building so its basically just a BBQ storage shed now so I could probably do it pretty easilly.

Its a while since I posted here.I guess that is becasue my plasma table is essentially complete. But it could do with a Z axis cover.

I finally worked out how to nest parts in waste (from inside cuts) and also worked out how to get sheetcam to sever a sheet after a nest is cut on my 1200 x 1200mm table. So I managed to get Sheetcam to cut 2 x 900 mm sections and 1 x 600 mm section from a 2400 mm sheet. I had a couple of goes at this (Yes I cut 2 sheets). If I did it again, I would cut the 600mm section first instead of last becasue I got a lot of warpage which caused probing errors with Plasmac because the probe was triggering too early. I'd love to see PLasmac compensate for a probe error that occurs before the Z axis gets to probe height.
Anyway, here is a short video



And for the diehard fanatics here is an extended one.