While waiting the two weeks for my plasma cutter to show up I spent the time getting to know Fusion 360 and Mach3. While playing around with a permanent marker in the torch holder on my CrossFire, I designed and built a swing away jig to cut larger parts on the CrossFire. It worked excellent! I will share it with you all when I get some time to refine it a bit. Right now the prototype is a bit ugly, made out of rusty scrap steel with remnants of old paint and some re-bar. The first pic is my first part that I cut. The second pic is the second part that I cut, 20"x41" part that I indexed using two tool paths and a single sheet of 12 gauge.
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nice. i was thinking of something like this but not automatic. looking forward to seeing what you’ve done
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Cant wait to see how you did it, we’ve been playing with this idea for longer stuff as well.
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Awesome work, would love to see the jig if your willing to share
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very interested myself!
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Hey, that jig would be helpful. Been thinking about this. Be interested in the details.
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@chipracer did you ever refine this jig?
Please share we would love to skip the troubleshooting you did 
Very interested as well! I have a long part I cut a lot a have to do it diagonally. Just barely get the cut, if I am off by .25" I am screwed. Plus it wastes alot of material cutting diagonally. Eager to see your design.
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Idexing jig just posted to fireshare and facebook page. Still waiting to see the youtube videos that show it in use and setup. thought you guys would want to know.
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chipracer and Infamousauto, I’d also really like to see more information on your indexing jig and how you use it on your plasma CNC. I understand the digital design needs to be modified, but for me, the software is the easier part. I definitely want to build one, but thought I’d stand on the shoulders of giants using your design vs trying to reinvent the wheel! Thanks in advance!
Interesting method. A couple of tips:
- you can manually set your margin line by double clicking on it and Inkscape will give you the option to overwrite either the absolute position of it or relative position. In your case, you could have double clicked and set the Y position to 24. Not a biggy, but pretty useful in cases like this.
- SheetCam will create unique layers if your layers have different colors so, rather than creating multiple files, you could make each unique Inkscape layer a unique color (primary colors are easiest) using the fill and stroke tool. Then, in SheetCam you can create unique operations for each layer.
- If your indexing size is smaller than the full range of your table travel, (22 inches for instance) your two layers can overlap and you can sometimes keep your shapes near the border intact without cutting through them.
- SheetCam will easily handle your full size object so you don’t have to have multiple jobs. If you have a set of operations per region and separate them with a Pause (M6 will do it) and then reset your Y origin, you can actually step through your entire design without reopening files, etc. See My First Indexed Workpiece and Next Indexed Yard Art work for examples.
Finally, nice tutorial, especially for your first one! You should give a tutorial on how to make tutorial!!
I even enjoyed the ‘french’ you threw in for color…
The stuff i shared is not my design it is a design uploaded by Jacob Dykas to the fireshare platform. I am but just a messenger passing on news of this design in a thread that i knew was still searching for answers.