Newb to cnc plasma

[NickAlpha]

Hi Guys, I found your forum while weighing up the pros and cons of a plasma table. We currently metal stamp a lot of our parts but am thinking the time to move to a cnc table might be now. I am in South Australia.
Cheers Nick

[acourtjester]

Welcome aboard there are others here from Australia, May help in your selection

[NickAlpha]

Cool, I'll keep an eye out.

[NickAlpha]

I have a question for someone with more experience than me (so basically everyone here). I have a hypertherm 125 with handheld torch at the moment. If I had that machine (with appropriate torch) mounted in a cnc table and were cutting 7/8 diameter holes in 5/8 thick mild steel plate, how much taper should I expect?

[robertspark]

minimum hole diameter with air plasma tends to be 2:1 (i.e twice the thickness). I only do thin stuff so 3:1 is my limit of what I have managed otherwise I spot and drill below 3x thickness.

5/8 X 2 = 1 1/4" dia min....
5/8 X 3 = 1 7/8" dia....

high definition plasma and truehole is 1:1 but a whole other price league than air plasma.... (being a hobby user I've never seen one in the flesh working so it's all a guess and from what I read)

[adbuch]

I have a question for someone with more experience than me (so basically everyone here). I have a hypertherm 125 with handheld torch at the moment. If I had that machine (with appropriate torch) mounted in a cnc table and were cutting 7/8 diameter holes in 5/8 thick mild steel plate, how much taper should I expect?

Here is some information from Jim Colt of Hypertherm on the subject.
David

hyperthermholes.pdf

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hyperthermholes.pdf

(708.31 KiB) Downloaded 55 times

[Rodw]

Hi Guys, I found your forum while weighing up the pros and cons of a plasma table. We currently metal stamp a lot of our parts but am thinking the time to move to a cnc table might be now. I am in South Australia.
Cheers Nick

Nick welcome aboard. I am in Brisbane. There is a very active group of Aussies using Linuxcnc's plasmac config. See http://linuxcnc.org/docs/2.8/html/plasm ... guide.html
In fact, the Plasmac developer is based in Melbourne.

[NickAlpha]

Thanks for the info Guys. What sort of machine are you running Rod? Will the linuxcnc take a dxf or do you need to Gcode your parts?

[Rodw]

Nick, I built my own table. (The Spaceship). There are some details here
viewtopic.php?f=103&t=22826
The spaceship has recently has morphed into a commercial prototype so one day we may be able to offer a carefully engineered package complete with prebuilt a controller.

I think there is a program called gcodetools (a part of inkscape I think) which will send DXF to Linuxcnc.
But I always use Sheetcam to lay out dxf's and convert to gcode as I generally cut a few parts or a sheet at a time.