hey gang. first off would like to give a big shout out to the Langmuir team for their support so far. we recently purchased a legacy crossfire 2x2 machine and ending up completely frying the USB board in the box by accident, and they sent us an updated box that allows us to use FireControl and all the proprietary stuff, so big thank you to you guys.
to begin: I am completely new to plasma cutting and cnc machines. I have used laser cutters for fabric before, but played no part in setting any of that up. now I’m trying to set up the crossfire for plasma cutting and its been quite the experience. I’ve gotten some great cuts, some not so great cuts, but every issue so far I’ve been able to figure out. the only thing I’m worried about is that I don’t entirely understand what the cutting issues im getting are stemming from.
I successfully got the G cut out (its a little messy, didn’t have the pressure set right yet) and the wheel spacer is clearly janked up looking, but was just a test piece and was successful in that I traced an image, matched all the measurements, and cut the design out accurately for part fabrication. those were cut out of 16 gauge mild steel. I thought I had figured out all the kinks so I decided to up the ante with 10 gauge steel and…
so what might cause something like this? It started to cut out the inner space, but then just stopped. moved on to some of the letters, cut them out as it should have, but then it completely gave up on those little flag bits at the bottom, and just picked some really random sections to ignore. In some sections I heard air and it just wasn’t arcing. in other sections it was just ignoring any instruction to fire entirely. any thoughts on this? I don’t know enough about plasma cutters to really list what it might be you guys would need to pinpoint anything, so feel free to ask me any questions and I’ll try to facilitate. Thank you for any help!
Are you using a machine torch or hand torch/ If hand torch don’t use the drag standoff attachment on torch head your cut height will be way to high off material. Can you post pic of how your torch is mounted. As far as not cutting all of design you might have open paths or not on same layer?
heres the torch setup. it has no attachment on the torch head so we can get as close to the material as necessary. As far as I can tell the design is all on one layer. would the fact its a .dxf exported from illustrator have anything to do with that? It’s pretty easy to design things in illustrator for me and seems to import into / export cut paths from fusion pretty seamlessly
Although your plasma cutter is not on the list of machines that they have found compatible, there could be something about that. Perhaps they may consider trying a USB isolator for your problem. It is curious how it is actually following the pattern but choosing to skip or interrupt certain parts of a contour. Almost like EMI.
Thats what puzzles me. especially because on 16 gauge metal at 25 amperage it seemed to do just fine. but once it was ramped up to 40 for 10 gauge it started having issues
