It’s been a while since i’ve shared any plasma cutting projects. Not that there haven’t been any, there have been plenty, just not the fun type to share. Mostly just pieces that have been folded into brackets, spacers, weld support pieces and gussets for custom angled go-cart frames, etc.
The plasma table had also been down for a few weeks while I finally dealt with the leaks / after affects from the sodium nitrate debacle. I’ve got it in a state where it is good to go for a year or so. I’ll probably have to re-seal the tank again next year and likely after that replace it, but for now it is good to go.
This project was a tiny bit notable as I knocked out a pretty good number of parts. I met a guy, over at the local makersace that was looking to get some parts knocked out for a an after-market truck product he is working on. He had already modeled up all of the parts and was able to send over DXFs of the parts that I could import into the legacy CAD system I use and some G-Code was generated.
After G-Code generation it was into the ‘post-post’ processor to insert the necessary functions for Mach-3 and the plasma system.
I’ll only show one of the 5 different parts we cut out here, so that I’m not giving away any of his design / product details. These pieces are simple lugs that get weled onto an assembly, one on each side of a clevis with a heavy duty bolt through the middle.
The material here is 1/4in mild steel
3/4 of the way through we moved the grounding clamp out of the way to finish using up this material and also added a block of steel for extra weight to keep the remaining steel from gettign pushed around by the air blast.
Most of hte pieces slipped easily down into the tank, to be retrieved later, however a small number are still visible in the photo, below.
In later steps the flat edge on the bottom will recived a heavy bevel on the 2x72 belt grinder to serve as weld prep for a deep penetrating weld. We chose to pierece and arc-in / out along that edge as that weld will also hide any possible nicks and make clean up of the parts that much easier. These parts, after welding to the rest of the assembly, will eventually be powder coated to finish them off.
-Kenneth