update on helping @Jerry2 - Jerry visited my shop in early Aug and we cut some 10ga.HR for the time critical parts he needed for his product sales at an upcoming trade show. He’s got a clever and simple product but I’ll let him explain that if he chooses.
Anyway, at our initial meeting we chatted about his trials, tribulations, and workflow with CNC plasma process. What I learned is that he had three generally significant inhibitors to success: unknowingly lacking necessary dry air supply, a leaky water pan at the seam which has him running just enough water to protect the pan bottom but otherwise no benefits of water pan, and struggling with [con]Fusion360 in both CAD and CAM.
He’s running a 4x3 Crossfire Pro model w RazorCut45 and (not recalling torch) I believe it’s w machine torch.
As for the lack of dry air- after I showed him my HF 8.3 SCFM@90 w add-on condenser, water trap/gross filter, 1 Qt desiccant dryer, and MotoGuard 60 final filter- he contracted me to build him one except w using the stock compressor at 5.4 SCFM@90. That is just enough air for continuous cutting with his torch and the PMX45 consumables. We used it yesterday with great success, it trapped 60mL of water over 45min of compressor runtime (I have the same torch head).
As for the water pan seam leak- I suggested try a pan disassembly, clean, reseal; or consider having it welded along the seam, I recall reading some folks on this forum have done the latter.
As for [con]Fusion360 skills- I explained my use cases for it (CAD only)- such as when having exacting specifications on tolerances for part interior shape locations where dimensioning and constraints are useful and/or sheetmetal flanges or other bends (K factoring). Save to dxf, then Sheetcam. Jerry’s parts don’t fit this criteria so I demo’d for him my go to workflow of LightBurn (CAD) and Sheetcam.
That was our initial day in the shop.
Yesterday Jerry return to pickup the new HF dry air supply system, and we retraced our steps on CAD, CAM, nesting, and cut more parts. Another successful day. We’ll likely have one more day in the shop sometime soon at his place, this time to translate the workflow I’ve shown him to his CF Pro machine and FireControl. I mentioned some time ago in this forum that I don’t own a CF machine, so my machine interface sw, gcode, THC, etc. workflow requires some eyes on/hands on translation to the CF counterpart components.
Someone on this forum (I don’t recall who) once said (paraphrasing) - “with CNC plasma process, EVERYING is a VARIABLE”. I shared that with Jerry, that was good advice when I read it and it’s still good advice to keep in perspective