Newbie from Northern Ireland

[alanmccabe]

HI everyone, glad I found your forum. My name is Alan McCabe I am based in Northern Ireland and have built two CO2 laser cutters since the start of lockdown here in the UK. I built a my first not so good one, sold lots of cut parts and that paid to upgrade to a better 1300x900 machine. A cnc plasma seemed like another interesting and complimentary project and I have been watching of youtube videos to try and get an understanding of things on the plasma side. Its been real good fun and very interesting. I expect I have made loads of bad choices in what I have done but hey thats the way to learn too. So at the minute I have a 4x4 setup using UCCNC and a UC300 eth card and have just managed to get my gantry's moving under there own steam so I have signed up to hopefully pick up a few scraps of knowledge .

Regards Alan

[plasmanewbie]

Welcome Alan, plenty of knowledge here to help you down the road of plasma cutting. Sounds like your off to a good start, have fun!

[acourtjester]

Welcome aboard Alan
Many Diy types here member all over the world, I have build a few tables, the one I an using now is similar to yours only with Plasma. As you know the tables part is very similar except for the working surface as an optional section. Your laser is very similar to routing, drag knife, and metal scribe as things are mounted on the work surface plate. Plasma use a grate to hold the metal so the plasma stream passes through into a water table or captive bin for the sparks. The G-codes handle the differences for the operations of the table as to its function.
What power is your laser, I had mounted a low power laser (5 Watt) but had a modulation problem, not sure if the control unit had failed, so the project was sidelined. AS you said learn as you go.

[robertspark]

Welcome (from near liverpool)

I'd be interested to know a bit about your setup & how you got going with a C02 laser etc.

[alanmccabe]

Thanks for the replies guys. This is my second Co2 Laser build. It uses a Ruida controller I essentially built it round the gantry with I purchased off from a supplier on Aliexpress. Fantastic machine cuts easily mdf, acrylic etc. The software setup is much easier than with the plasma to be fair. I use a program called Lightburn to design my item and then it sends the cut info direct to the laser.

[robertspark]

very nice

[acourtjester]

very nice from the looks of your setup your no rookie