computer aided plasma table

A friend of mine has a table (not sure brand/model), he has a very busy shop. Hasn't had time to learn it, he's offered me free reign.

So where do i start? Is it even do-able for a late 40's almost 50 mechanic? It excites me, motivates me, but yet is intimidating. It can lead into some freelance (read extra income) possibly a career change

Any suggestions on where i should start? ie sites, coarse'

Thanks for any opinions folks

I've had stuff done on a waterjet. It's all about the CAD. I did my own CAD work with TurboCad, then exported the files and they cut them out of 1/2" 304 plate. So, do you do CAD? That would be a good place to start. After that, the machines have optimizers, I think, to pick the best route, accuracy versus speed (time is money), etc. Surely there's a manual with his machine. That would be a good second step.

The one I had work done on in high school held your hand pretty well as I recall, you didn't need to know G code or anything like that for simple jobs. I'm pretty sure you just fed it DWG files (blueprints) or even image files and told it what lines to follow. Get the model number and acquire the manual for it and go from there.

As Dr Hess points out it's all CAD based, running the machine is the easier part of the process. I never touched it until I was 58 Yrs old (still learning)but it has been fairly easy to pick up. Also helps that my son installed tables and trained new operators for EZ Cut CNC before opening his own fab shop last year. As far as sites try practical machinist, many of the table companies have forums, hypertherm, etc.

So no, based on my experience your not too old to learn it, and yes, very profitable side work

Copy all of the above. If'n you need a hand with anything on the CAM side, lemme know. I work for the biggest* CAM software company [Clarkson voice]In the WORLD [/Clarkson voice]. There's also a lot of us former or current cad monkeys on this site. And yes, it is very, very doable for that dog to learn a new trick or two :) Manufacturing operator/programmers are HOT right now in the job market. All of the shops I work with are clamoring for people who can show up, be dependable and think mechanically. If you can program using CAM, all the better!

As the others said, there's probably dedicated software with it already that will take care of the heavy lifting. The cad side is unlimited, but there's lots of good software out there for cheap and it probably comes with some half-arse cad design package that'll get you going.

I haven't personally ran a flame table, but I know that our software drives a lot of 'em. The big thing is the dwell upon laser firing and the feedrate through material to get your cut without too much slag, but I'm assuming that the software, manual and probably their tech support can get you up and running quick.

.

*Marketing disclaimer: by total seats installed since 1982

Thank you folks! i appreciate all of it!

Find out what software he has and report back to us. Do you have any CAD experience? Even autocad will be a huge benefit, but a newbie should be able to figure out 2D toolpaths just fine.

There is good money to be made in this industry. Even if it ends up just being a hobby, I say go for it!

I had some CAD experience in college, "formally" trained, i.e. I had a class and lab for drafting and Autocad, and have always been fairly mechanically and tech savvy, but had never done anything with CNC until one day, that was my job.

Tight ass (cheap) boss at the time, bought a used one-off early '90s 5'x12' CNC Plasma table with a Hypertherm HD 1070 (I think) and an old Burny controller. The table was the company that made its first and only foray into the world of plasma, they went from making gas torch tables (I assume oxy-accetelyne), made one plasma table, then said forget it, and started making lasers or water jets, I forget now which, not important to the story, just suffice it to say, I had some old ass equipment to work with, and no real technical support.

We started out with BobCad as our CAD software dujour, it was decided before I was hired, and based solely on price and Airgas' "CNC Guy's" recommendation, it may be better now, but you'll never get me to say much nice about them, I imagine if you searched my user name and Bobcad, you'll find related form posts around the web, from about 10 years ago of me ready to drive to Florida and have words with some of their "support," staff. Boss finally saw the light, and we went whole hog with Solidworks. I did way more than just 2D sheet parts, I did all the drafting and plans for everything we made too.

As much as I cussed BobCad, they did make us a "custom" post processor, for our ancient plasma table, that while a little cumbersome, did a half way decent job of nesting parts on a sheet, and once I learned the table, and tweaked my kerfs, lead-ins, lead-outs, etc. I was able to just program entire nested sheets for specific products. I had a binder, with pictures showing what the cut sheet of metal looked like and program number on it. We had an old desktop in the corner running Burny Server in a DOS window 24/7, that the Burny talked to via RS-232. I trained a handful of the weldors how to call up a program and run it, all they had to do was load a sheet of metal, type the program number they wanted from the binder, and hit start.

The actually cutting stuff is the easy part.

It'd be worth while to take a night course, or if there's any free online classes, to get an idea of how to handle the CAD side of things. Most software has tutorials though, so teaching yourself isn't difficult, and there's countless tutorial videos on youtube for most popular software.

I learned by doing on the CAM and CNC side, and while I succeed, I made things a lot harder on myself that need be. I had a big book for our Burny controller, that actually did a decent job of teaching me G codes, with tutorials, and various trial shapes. Once you start getting a hang of the codes, or at least can reference a chart or something, everything is easy X Y coordinates. Really though, as much as software has progressed, I bet actually knowing G code isn't necessary, even when I was doing it for a living, it got to the point that I only used it if something screwed up and I need to trouble shoot.

The real trick in my experience was the post processing CAM, once you have your parts designed, you know how to cut them, then you need to maximize your efficiency and minimize wasted metal.

Regardless, it's not the insurmountable voodoo witch craft that some like to make it out to be. If you can drive a car, you can probably learn to run CNC, some exceptions apply of course.

I kind of wrote a novel, sorry.

Make some popcorn. Go to Youtube and search for how to use a CNC plasma cutter.

People who design this stuff are paid a lot of money to make the user experience easy.

CNC Plasma has a reputation for being imprecise versus Laser or waterjet, which is true, but part of the reputation is because people don't set them up right. The biggest factors being feed rate and tip selection. Shops whose bread-and butter are doing things like structural brackets for buildings don't have anything like the tolerances car guys work with. My point being that properly set up, CNC Plasma is surprisingly tight. Set up wrong and it's butt ugly.

Thank you everyone!

I am going to his shop thursday after work to get aquainted with it, I will get more info. But everything you are telling me is helping!

Kreb wrote: CNC Plasma has a reputation for being imprecise versus Laser or waterjet, which is true, but part of the reputation is because people don't set them up right. The biggest factors being feed rate and tip selection. Shops whose bread-and butter are doing things like structural brackets for buildings don't have anything like the tolerances car guys work with. My point being that properly set up, CNC Plasma is surprisingly tight. Set up wrong and it's butt ugly.

We have a CNC Plasma where I work. I've made quite a few things for my projects on there. Once I figured out the tolerances, the parts need very little clean up to fit.

so the whole story comes out, listening to his employee's. The unit is aisan, Start shaphon, (the control head and table) the plasma cutter is Esab deuce pack 150,the software for the system is "ucancam", it did 2 simple cuts, then pilot lights, the HF (high frequency) starts, and the HF stops the pattern keeps tracing and the pilot arcs/stops,

Yesterday i spent the afternoon trying to get aquainted with it, cleaned the table off, set the corner limits of the table, cleaned and lubed the tracks

I don't believe the software is the problem, tonight we taped a sharpie to the cutting head and ran a couple patterns (simple to start like me).

My suspicion is the speed (travel) is to slow and the its extinguishing the arc

I know i'm not using the right lingo, But I'm trying

successfully ran patterns last night, went to do a cut, and kept receiving G92 error code.

Figure its a co=ordinate based code (hey look at me go), now having an issue getting the torch control to set, (start sh hc-30), the indicators are flashing,

printing off manuals tomorrow and try again,

Can you point us to the manuals for your machine/control? I'm fairly familiar with codes and machine troubleshooting. I might be able to help :)

Thanks Wonko (friggin love that name). tonight i got the G92 cleared, (was a matter of reseting the zero)

i guess thats where it starts from?

i was able to run all the preset patterns, was feeling confident, so i attempted to make some cuts, the coding must be screwed up some where, when the plasma should be "on" it is off, when the air (gas) should be off its on,

start shaphon model sh-2012kz-qc

documentation is nil with this, ive emailed the company to try to find out how to do a "master reset"

i am 98% sure that someone "adjusted" a parameter and thats whats stopping me from going forward

Thanks :)

"Normally" G92 is threading cycle (as in, threadmilling to create a screw thread), but that's a fanuc-based system.. I have heard of some controls using it as a work offset, matching your experience. That just means that this will be very loosely to not at all fanuc compatible, which normally makes finding help a bit more difficult.

I did find this http://www.soldgreat.com/user_manual/SF_2200H.pdf of a "2200H" machine. It lists G92 as a "reference point setup." The trick with a CNC machine is to know how to set a reference (also called Work Coordinate System). To a CNC machine, the machine "home" is 0,0,0. Now, you set a part on there somewhere in space to be cut. You don't want to have to figure out how far that part is from the "Real" machine 0,0,0 so you go over and position the spindle at the lower left corner of your part and set your G92/WCS to tell it that THIS position is my new 0,0,0. That way it doesn't matter where the part is physically placed on the machine, it will always run the same as long as you set your 0s.

The good news is that it looks like the rest of things are fairly standard.

According the shady PDF that probably infected me with malware and made my computer part of a botnet, M07 is turn air & plasma ON, and M08 is to turn it off.

For a simple test, you should be able to find the line of code at the beginning with the M08/M07 and invert them, so, for example, if the code is:

G0 X10 Y10 Z.1, this means that it'll rapid (G0, go as fast as possible) to 10,10,.1.

The next line of code is probably something like: G1 Z.01 F10 M07 which says Feed (G1) at 10 inches Per Minute from Z.1 (where you were) to Z.01. Now turn on the flame (M07).

You can try just changing the M07 to M08, OR, hopefully, it's already M08, and that means the config or Post Processor for the CAM software is screwed up.

thank you, this will help greatly when I get back on it tomorrow.

Dude, I was just looking these up this morning.

When I was designing and building pump packages we had a supplier that asked us to go a plasma cut and CNC bent frame instead of the normal I-beam C-channel construction most people did.

BEST SUGGESTION EVER! Lighter, more features were able to be integrated into the frame and with a cleaner more finished look.

I would learn the crap out of that if I had the capital. (I'm 42 and a mediocre Mechanical Engineer at best)

G92 is an old school Work Coordinate system. We run some old school Fanuc controllers that use it and omit G53, G54, G55, etc.

Be careful though, some machines lose all other references when you set a G92.

When a program calls out G92 it basically resets the registers to whatever the current location is. This may overwrite the machine home position.

2002maniac wrote: G92 is an old school Work Coordinate system. We run some old school Fanuc controllers that use it and omit G53, G54, G55, etc. Be careful though, some machines lose all other references when you set a G92. When a program calls out G92 it basically resets the registers to whatever the current location is. This may overwrite the machine home position.

Thanks for the history lesson, 2002! How old school is it? Like I mentioned, I've heard rumors of it, but I didn't realize Fanuc themselves did it. I'm assuming it was for limited production machines like this with only one part setup. Knowing Fanuc, the multiple part offset option cost $5000 back in 1982 or something

I'm a multiaxis guy, so I've never really gotten to play with anything that old.

I'd have to look, but i think the machines we use G92 on range from the 80s-90s. One is an ancient horizontal boring mill that's been retrofitted to 5 axis NC control.

We recently had an operator use a G92 while setting up a probing station on a brand new 6-axis mill-turn with a Fanuc 31i and it cleared the tool changer's home position. Oops!

Who do you work for? Mastercam? I've used it a bunch in the past, but have been an NX guy for 4 years now. Our machinists use MC for tooling programs and they've been complaining about the new UI. Then again, they complain about everything, so I hardly listen anymore.

Cool that we've got so many CAM people on the board.

Yessir, I'm over at Mastercam. NX is a pretty good program, I hear the newer versions have improved some of the aggravation/overhead the older versions have. I'd love to spend some more time with the new stuff, I haven't gotten to try any of the multiaxis capability though my team mate over here has quite a bit of experience with it. In my arena, I generally go up against Delcam or Hypermill/Openmind.

I'll bet that operator will never do that again! Ha.. That's the sort of thing you can't vericut :)

Yeah, our new interface has some of the older guys grumbling, but it does seem that complaining about everything is a time-honored shop tradition, so I'm just glad to contribute to it :) Seriously, in all of our customer and reseller polling, it rates significantly higher in almost every category than the old stuff, but everyone has that one or two little things that work different now, and they prefer it that one piece the old way (myself included). I'd have extreme trouble going backwards, though.

Yeah, it is cool to see so many people in the industry around here :)

Little update, the biggest, baddest ESAB dual deuce, is a flaming pile of poo. The table runs nice and smooth, the esab refuses to play nice. After talking last night i think he's gonna replace it.

But i can see where i will truly enjoy running it, and the side cash will come in handy