I'm sure you all see hundreds of requests every year by people who think they want to build something and never do. I hope to NOT be "that guy". I have built a nice 2kW CNC mill and a CNC 40W CO2 laser cutter, so I'm quite familiar with the controls and software associated with CNC. My mill is pretty much single purpose, but I have recently modified it to handle general purpose jobs. Its main use is to cut various hole shapes in 1mm thick steel single gang outlet plates for my business. It takes a little over a minute for my mill to cut out these plates.
Example:
I use flood coolant and a good AlTiN milling bit and it lasts for several hundred plates. But now I'm bored with this and I want to speed up my production, so I'm thinking Plasma. I go through about 1000 plates a year with about 7 different hole patterns. This is too low of a production to consider stamping dies or outsourcing for cutting, but getting to be too high to be sitting behind my mill for hours on end. Time is money.
With this in mind, I was thinking about building a small CNC plasma machine, maybe capable of 2' by 2', and slapping a Hypertherm 30 on it to cut my plates. I say Hypertherm because I really have no knowledge of the various cutters and have only heard good things about the Hypertherm being able to do some fine detailed cutting. So, here is where I would appreciate some advice. Am I on the right track to think Hypertherm for this single purpose 1mm cutting application, or are there others I should consider? Other than the CNC build, which I am quite capable of doing, I would need a torch height controller. I'm fine with a "hobby" type controller as long as it would give me a good repeatable piercing cut. Any advice? Lastly I will use my existing copy of Mach3, which handles my gcode and does THC the last time I checked. Anybody foresee any problems with this?
To prove how much of a Newbie I am, I ask the following about Plasma... Do I need to worry about the fact that my steel plates are powder coated? I figure the plasma just blasts through, but thought I should ask. Also, if I were to commit my entire machine to have a true single purpose, which is cutting these plates, placed at an exact location with the same height to the torch every time, can the system run without an active torch height control?
Thanks!
John