This is my take on an old design. My dad had an old cross-cut saw with a laser line generator to align the cut. Most of the time when lining things up for plasma cutting I’m only tryikng to hit +/-0.025 since I’m going to cut the periphery anyway.
I modeled the following in CAD and then 3D printed it. I’m using readily available (eBay special) lasers and just extending the power cables through the cable trays on my AVID 48x96 pro dual headed CNC.
eBay was my buddy on this project.
This is designed to fit a HyprerTherm Duramax-45 Amp machine torch.
The first photo shows dialing in the edge of a 2x4ft piece of sheet stock. Move to one edge, place the laser line 1/2 on the part, 1/2 in the tank. Drive the gantry to the other end and bump the plate until it is 1/2 on the part, 1/2 in the tank. It is just that simple.
Now-a-days I use this method to dial in just about everything on the plasma table. One advantage of using ‘green’ lasers is that they show up on mill-scale much better than red lasers which tend to not show as well. An example, below is this 1/2-in thick bar-stock that I just finished cutting.
it doesn’t show in the photo, but I designed it to be “spot on” in the CAD model and then just shimmed it with a folded over piece of paper to “dial it in” so that it lined up perfectly after installation.
Da-Kengineer-Meister