[rogerfries]

I'm a home hobby user with a home built plasma table. It works great, no real issues. I recently added the Warp 9 Warprunner THC and I think it's working correctly, but I'm finding it might be more trouble than it's worth. It seems I need to tune the anti dive settings just right. I was hoping it would be more automatic. Anyway I'll keep working on getting the THC settings right. It occurred to me that what I really want is Mesh bed leveling like good 3D printers do automatically. When I built my table I made it reasonably co planer to the X/Y of the motion and I think It's very close, but I was not hyper focused on this as I expected the THC to make up for any error. Even if my table were perfectly dead on co plainer between the bed and the X/Y Plane, as the support grid takes damage from cuts there will be some error pretty quick with slag building up on the rails. I really want to be able to throw a sheet on the table and cut it, not waste time shimming the plate so it's perfect. With 3D printing the bed must be perfect, so they have mesh bed leveling where the printer probes the table in a grid and creates a surface map and adjust the Z axis to compensate. This would not help to detect metal warpage of thin metals, but would really help on thicker plates. What do you think, Is Mesh Bed Leveling practical or done on plasma tables?
Thanks!

[joeavaerage]

Hi,
I make circuit boards with my mill. This process is very dependent on precise depth control, a few um 'not deep enough' and the copper is not cut away, a few um 'too deep' and you cut into the fiberglass under the copper layer.

To assist this I use a free software utility called Autoleveler. It probes the surface then then 'corrects' any height variation by manipulating the Z axis code.
It could work for you. You would need to probe the surface of the material prior to cutting so would add a time consuming task to each job.

I think you need to persevere with the Warprunner, its a very good and very capable board. Once you get it tuned properly you'll have a solution to match or even exceed many commercial or industrial plasma THC set up.

Craig

[rodw]

Auto levelling is useless for a plasma machine. That is because the material warps from the heat during cutting. Even 16mm will warp during cutting.
I have had 2mm plate warp as much as 40mm while cutting.
You have to use a THC to account for this.
If you have to fiddle with settings, your THC is of dubious quality.