Looking for something that can cut at least 1/4" steel at 48"x120". DIY maybe? I know we've had a couple guys brew their own. What do I need to know and where should I look?
Looking for something that can cut at least 1/4" steel at 48"x120". DIY maybe? I know we've had a couple guys brew their own. What do I need to know and where should I look?
1/4" steel? Where I used to work we would occasionally cut up to 3/8, but for nromal usage 1/4" was the limit. That laser was 3 Kilowatts.
Home level lasers are usually like 5-40watts.
What kind of accuracy do you need? Could you use a CNC plasma cutter instead?
In reply to ProDarwin :
CNC plasma could potentially work, maybe. What sort of accuracy is a CNC plasma limited to
11 Gauge would be the next most common size used.
I think a water jet may be the tool you're looking for.
At that size, you're looking for something commercial - which means it has to run as much as possible to make it financially viable. I'd look to see if there's someone else in your area that's made the investment. I know of at least two water jets in my town I could get time on, and one of them even sells the steel :)
+3 on waterjet. Pretty affordable compared to may other options out there and pretty easy on upkeep.
Keith Tanner said:At that size, you're looking for something commercial - which means it has to run as much as possible to make it financially viable. I'd look to see if there's someone else in your area that's made the investment. I know of at least two water jets in my town I could get time on, and one of them even sells the steel :)
This isn't for me*. Job is looking to expand and get away from outside vendors as much as possible. Waterjet might be a possibility, but I kind of doubt they'll want to deal with that level of consumable materials.
* I mean... I'll use it...
Mr_Asa said:In reply to ProDarwin :What sort of accuracy is a CNC plasma limited to
0.050" is what I was always told. How dimensionally accurate is required.
The other options are waterjet, as already mentioned, or Fiber laser. A fiber laser to handle that size of material is likely to cost $50k. Probably needs to be at least 1k watts.
There's also high definition plasma, which is supposed to be much more accurate than traditional plasma, but at an additional cost that puts it in the same league as waterjet.
Laser machines from reputable American and European companies are damn expensive. You can get much less costly ones from China with generally very iffy tech support, or you can get used, but used machines usually have mega hours on them. When I was seriously shopping, what I often heard about lasers is that if you want to make money on them you need to run multiple shifts.
Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:When I was seriously shopping, what I often heard about lasers is that if you want to make money on them you need to run multiple shifts.
We don't necessarily want to make money on the laser, we want to avoid sending money out of the shop. If that makes sense? At one point early on they had to send the aluminum extrusions out to get them cut accurately so they could be packaged and sent out to customers, this was because there wasn't even a saw in the shop. One day they saved enough money to buy a good saw and 15ish years later that same saw is doing its thing in the corner of the shop. Its that kind of thing, they want to invest in the shop so they aren't sending any part of the job out of the shop.
I know there's a break-even point, and the more you use the laser the faster you approach the break-even, but there have also been issues with our laser vendors. For instance, our main supplier is Alro. They're building a new facility in Orlando and they're bringing people from their other shops to that one, possibly even bringing equipment. The local Alro shop has had their laser down for 2-3 weeks now and doesn't know when it will be back up, as a result we've got jobs sitting in limbo waiting on them.
So, its not that we want to run a competitor to SendCutSend out of the shop or anything like that, its more about self sufficiency and opening up our abilities. Depending less on outside vendors.
Eventually we probably will want to run something similar to SCS out of the shop, even if its for local stuff customers, but that's more from ambition from the owners than an end goal.
Going back to accuracy, 0.050" is probably ok for almost all of our stuff
Although being able to be better than that if need be would be good for future-proofing. Most of our stuff is fairly loose
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