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Hello All,

My name is Sean, I work for a small but growing metal fabrication shop here in Alabama called Titan Fabrication ( www.TitanFabrication.com ). We are about to make a large jump in our capabilities by bringing in a 5x10 Dynatorch system with a Hypertherm P85 and are really looking forward to doing some cool things with this machine.
We made the trip up to Padukah a couple weeks ago to visit the guys and see the operation to help us to finalize our decision to go with a Dynatorch system. I would like to add that I can't say enough about the personal attention and great technical info we have received thus far in person from Russ, as well as through phone conversations with Leon. We could tell while we were there that several of the guys we met are truly excited about building these machines. As of this week we are officially in line to have our dual Dropside Gantry kit built and it should be ready for us to pick up in about 3 weeks.

I have been on a CNC knowledge crash course for the last few weeks and have learned a lot but know I am only scratching the surface. It's very addictive once you get started!! First of all I want to express thanks to everyone that makes this site possible as well as those that contribute all the awesome information. There are some very ingenious people on these forums. I look forward to an interchange of inspiration by being a member here.

The reason for starting this post is that we have decided to build our own machine frame and water table. I hope that we can benefit from community knowledge as it applies to what we are doing, and can hopefully give back by sharing some of our seemingly unique ideas and how they work out (or don't) in reality. The plan is for this frame and water table design to be completely CAD designed in a solid model and shared here so we can exchange ideas over a virtual build, hopefully ending up with a greatly improved end result. In the end I would like to make a publicly shared e-drawings file available so that others may be able to benefit fully from our combined efforts as they contemplate their own builds.

Hopefully this topic will be successful in this forum without having to be moved to the main project log forum since this is somewhat specifically Dynatorch related.

Now on to the build details…

We have a lot of materials on hand already, and to an extent the materials that we have will determine the way that we build while trying to avoid making any major compromises for that reason.

Current material plans are:

4” x 7Ga.Square Tube Legs
2” x 4” x 7Ga. Rec. Tube Main Frame Rails
2” x 3” x 7Ga. Rec. Tube Main Water Table Frame Rails
1.5” x 11Ga.” Square Tube Secondary Water Table Support/Frame Gusseting
4” x 11Ga. Slat Material. Slot holders with provisions for slats every 2”, but normally running them installed every 4”.

We are planning a dual chamber adjustable level water table that will most likely be constructed from of all things… 11Ga. aluminum treadbright… Yeah I know…but we have a several 12’ sheets and loads of drops in this material from a recent job. If we use it the tread side will be turned out and not really very visible (or at all if we skin the sides). We would prefer to use a different material, but this is what we have unless somebody needs some 4’x12’ sheets of this material to use for a more suitable purpose? Any input as to why we shouldn’t use this is welcome.

One idea I have been anxious to open up to your scrutiny is the idea of having slat holders which are able to raise the slats for forklift loading/unloading. Obviously one of the great advantages of a drop side table is the ease of loading material onto the machine. It seems that with many water tables you give some of that advantage away by having walls which are above the slat surface to a varying extent based on table design. What we are proposing to do is to use several custom built hydraulic cylinders (more of a ram actually) which are a variation of a pancake cylinder to raise and lower the slat level by about 1”. This would allow us to run our water level right against the bottom of the plate for cutting if we wish, and also allow for above machine grade loading/unloading. These cylinders are of our own design and outside of some CNC lathe work would be constructed in house. Here is a picture of the concept I have put together on this so far. The ram is about 3.25" tall overall.


We have not had the opportunity to do production work with a machine like this. From the outside looking in this seems to us like it would be a pretty big improvement. My question for you is, are we making a problem out of something that isn’t really a problem? Does anybody feel like they would benefit from having this capability? Thank you in advance for your input.

Something else we hope to be able to get some input on is a good design for adjustable linear rail / gear rack mounts. We have seen some examples of these here, but hope to gather some information from those that have done them, how they have worked out and would you do anything different.

Along those lines another thing we have considered is using linear bearing rails on both sides of the x axis. The Dynatorch gantries are not normally set up this way. They use a linear rail one the master side with floating v-groove wheels on the slave side. It appears though that the construction of their gantry is symmetrical, so we could do this if there was enough advantage in doing so. It seems all of the very high end machines (not meant to take away from the Dynatorch) run linear rails to guide both sides of the x axis. Obviously this comes with very critical alignment concerns which I would imagine is one of the main reasons why Dynatorch builds their gantry the way they do. What is everyone’s input on this?

Well, this post is definitely long enough, and should hopefully be a good start. We hope to be well along in the construction of our frame and water tank by the time our Gantry is finished, so this thread should stay moving along pretty good.

I look forward to your input

Sean