will the cut edge get discolored or have issues down the road? got someone asking about a sign that will be outside. ive nver cut stainless before.
Yes and yes. There is a HAZ (Heat Affected Zone) with plasma cutting just like there is when welding stainless. With an AVIDcnc and a correctly functioning THC and correctly programmed travel speed, the HAZ is super small. Where MIG/TIG welding one might expect 3/16~1/4in (depending on material thickness, travel speed and heat input) it is pretty common with the plasma cutter to have 0.050 or less. Since this is air plasma cutting, there will be surface discoloration that will needed to be ground/sanded back if a cosmetic finish is needed. I’ve done several signs with thinner material and simply hitting the surface lightly with an angle grinder (flap wheel or paint stripping wheel) was more than enough to clean it up. There are a few examples of that shared here in the projects pages of this forum.
You can zee the HAZ in the photo 3 & 4 of this Project
Also visible in the closeup photo of the ghost in this https://forum.avidcnc.com/t/a-fun-halloween-project-from-back-in-2020/2049
I’ve done a few other projects in stainless (mostly thinner stuff, I’ve only recently started cutting thicker stainless on the AVIDcnc) and edge quality seems to be pretty consistently the same as these.
@da-kengineer-meister have you tried cutting submerged with stianless? I think I passed over one of your post not that long ago and it didn’t appear to be submerged.
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@subnoize , The HyperTherm45-XP that I am using, requires air/gas pressure at its input and it actually measures the flow or it will give an error code and lockout operation. The unit itself regulates the output pressed down to 80PSI. 80PSI is still enough that the arc and it’s contact point (and a good amount of area around it) are going to be fully evacuated from water and directly exposed to the atmosphere while the material is molten.
To answer your specific question, I have not tried that with Stainless, and it is not clear to me that the THC is set up to support submerged operation? I might look to @Eric / AVID for input on whether that is supported? Is it supposed to work submerged? I understand that production machines support this, however it is not clear that this system on the smaller plasma power plants do/do-not support it.
In Aluminum I’ll often bring the water level right up to the top edge of the material and there will be quite a bit of water splashing back up on top, but that isn’t submerged and the air blast with that much pressure definitely clears it right off. Also, the AVIDcnc tank / baffel system are short enough that there isn’t much room above a piece of 1/4in material to submerge more than at most 1/8in? (just guessing on that dimension from memory.) 1/8in standing water doesn’t stand a chance against 80psi air.
@subnoize , Have you done fully submerged cutting on an AVIDcnc with the shallow water bed? How did that work for you?
So, I’m answering with a few questions there in my answer…? @Eric
Water is a poor conductor. I have run copper sheet submerged on my Avid + Hypertherm 45xp. It was about 1/4 inch submerged. A friend of mine cuts with the same torch and the 45xp but his machine is made by Hypertherm. So different steppers and controller but he submerges his stainless 1 to 2 inches.
PS. It’s his setup that gave me the idea into how to do the “tru-hole tech” from Hypertherm. The only difference between his machines and ours is the ModBus port on his 45xp.
@da-kengineer-meister I don’t know the answer honestly, I’ll ask the engineers.
At the end of the day we’re just pushing around a torch. There’s no real “magic” to the tables.
Sounds like @subnoize is doing this no problem. My guess is that it spews a lot of water around!
Get yer rubber ducks out…
New game - use your manual jog pendant to poke the ducks!
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