Pierce Delay query

The documentation I see in the Langmuir stuff seems to say that I should not go below half a second pierce delay as it may cause problems. My cut charts say to use .4 for 14 and 16 and .2 for 18. I am a bit concerned about setting it lower than recommended but I am seeing the result of too long of a pierce. it’s not huge but I can see it. Has anyone run shorter pierce delays.

sorry for the remedial question, I am fairly new to this but finally making progress on figuring out what I don’t know. This is better than when I started and did not know what I did not know.

Gotta say, I am fairly amazed at the things I can accomplish with this tool.

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on some scrap, start with a higher value say .8 then go down .1 at a time until it doesn’t fire then set it .1 or 2 up.

so if you start at .8 and it doesn’t fire at say .4 then your nominal pierce delay setting should be .5 -.6

that’ll need to be increased as you go up in gauge.

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Good idea, Thanks! I can do a one inch straight cut on scrap. It fires at .5 I’ll go down from there.

Was worried about starting a project and wasting it. So simple.

The recommended minimum is 0.5. You won’t learn much starting that low.

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Do your testing in a file with multiple pierces. For reasons I can’t explain, Firecontrol makes the delay longer on the first pierce. For this reason, a lot of people report problems with “cutting voltage lost” errors on the second pierce.

I know Langmuir recommends .5 second minimum, but I have used as low as .25 seconds on my Everlast with no issues. I’m still using Firecontrol version 20.6.2, so your experience with newer versions may be different. The newer versions seem to be more sensitive to voltage errors.

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Thanks, I have a tiny part I’ll repost with the settings It has three pierces total. I will try and report back.

I set it for .3 pierce delay and it cut did all three in the file. So I guess it works. Don’t know why I was hesitant to try so I think .4 will work. Using an older Hypertherm 65 Amp unit set to cut at 45 amps on 16 gauge. YMMV

scratch that, it did work but it was unexpected behavior. it pierced for far longer than .3 seconds. the cut was crap so I thought I had some setting wrong. Everything is spot so you can set it shorter but it appears to make it run longer. this was a visual observation but I have a good idea of what a half a second it and …

I’m sure it’s been mentioned above but the first pierce delay has added time to it so you can only really judge your second pierce delay in your code.

For 14 gauge I reduce my Pierce delay from 0.5 to 74% in Firecontrol and it’s still fires well . It ends up being .37 seconds

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thank you, I am still learning what I don’t know but it is coming together. this helps a ton. I know it seems basic but …