You can put a 220 plug on any 220 compressor, just got to be sure you have the amps at the wall plug.
You will never regret going bigger, you may going smaller. I don’t like the husky stuff, never did. My son has the Dewalt 60 gal, my brother and a buddy have the big IR compressors, they all like them just fine. I think you may overwork the 3.7 hp compressor at some point, these motors are not made for continuous service.
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Thanks for the advice. I went back to tractor supply and brought gone the 60 gallon IR single stage 5hp.
The weight of the 80 is the drawback. It was significantly harder to tip and wiggle around. The 60 was very manageable. Already have some SO cord hanging out just need a plug and a regulator to throw on it and we are in business. I’ll source a filter and drain setup soon.
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Nice, that should service you well.
Be sure to bolt it to the floor, they do walk around.
Ah yes, that too. Bought some pads for it, just got to drill them and the floor.
Edit. Got it wired up, my god it’s amazing. You can just watch the needle climb. Even quieter than my old 30 gal husky that they advertised as quiet.
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Could someone measure the height of the whip that keeps the torch cable held up above the table? I’m looking to basically put a loft over my table to give me more storage and to help contain dust and fumes. I’m hoping it’s below 6 feet from the floor to the top of the whip? Anyone know?
81" on mine. But I’ve got mine on casters so it’s 4" taller than stock. Either way, taller than the 72 you want.
Now that I think about it, I probably wouldn’t need the whip if I had a ceiling at 72”, I could just put a hook up there and let it hold the torch.
You could also bend the whip if you have a tubing bender (or fill with sand first) to add another jog in it up near the top end maybe or increase the stock bend. It is much taller than the original but I expect that helps keep the cables from dragging.
Well, after toiling over buying a new computer with more graphics power, I messed with running sheet cam in a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Got it loaded and everything, but there was some lag. The whole goal was to avoid having to reboot into windows just to run sheet cam. It’s not hard to do, and I already have the license, just didn’t want to do it. Mainly because I didn’t want to draw in my vector program (Affinity) then export to svg to Inkscape, then save as dxf, then throw into sheet cam.
Inkscape is fine, but after adjusting to affinity, it runs so much better and I can work faster with it.
Well, I loaded up sheet cam and decided to play around to see if I really wanted to use it instead of fusion. After a few minutes, I was in love. I didn’t know this, but sheet cam will take a vector just fine. Didn’t have to convert to dxf. Saving the tool settings was easier, selecting the layers and paths was super easy to just figure out, it’s great. Absolutely going to run with sheet cam and just reboot into windows to use it. Using my iCloud Drive, I won’t have to mess with USB drives or anything either. Such a great solution.
Now, it appears that you can save your tools. So I’m thinking if you have a collection of them you can export them and share them. Has anyone posted their tool setups for others to download? I’m talking like a tool profile for 16 gauge mild steel on a Hypertherm PM45XP. I’m assuming if someone has set up that profile and has it working well that I could just drop that into my sheet cam and rock and roll.
Anyone have thoughts on this?
Yeah, that happens a lot. Especially to Fusion refugees!
I also have serious, deep seeded issues with this subscription BS that is rampant these days.
I get product development and what not and preventing piracy, but I hate not being able to own something I pay for. That’s why I avoid adobe, and went with affinity for graphic work.
I hear ya! Sketchup Pro is the same way. This year’s update went up 20% and it’s not like they’re putting in great new features every year! Last straw to get me to move to another CAD program…
BTW, I’ve used Affinity Photo and I love it and would love to love Affinity Design. My problem is that it is also pretty overwhelming and, when I look for tutorials, I find a TON of really great “how to do Web Page or World Class Marketing artwork”, but have yet to find one that is a simple, “this is how you replace Inkscape with Affinity Design to do your yard art on your plasma cutter”. Have you seen any and can you recommend any tutorials for us simpletons?
Oh I’m definitely a simpleton as well. I’m not doing any crazy fills or texturing or anything.
For the most part it’s similar to Inkscape. What I got hung up on was merging paths and disconnecting nodes and joining them to other paths.
At first it didn’t matter how I went about my designs because I would just layer crap on top of crap to make it look right. But I then became obsessed with ensuring everything was perfectly symmetrical and squared and aligned. I was getting by just fine designing stickers, but in the last couple of months I really turned a corner with a couple of key features.
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Turned on the grid and snapping to the grid as well as setting the grid points to the dimensions I was going for. Unfortunately it doesn’t export in exactly the size, but as long as you have a known distance element you can resize in sheet cam it looks like.
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The subtract feature. Let’s say you want a star outline overlayed with two other shapes. Instead of drawing the paths and trying to line it up and having multiple overlapping paths, you can copy an element, hit subtract them paste back the element and it essentially takes the “bite” out of the design and leaves you with a clean path.
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The corner tool. Anywhere you have a path turning you can use this to generate a perfect curve. Took me a while to find this.
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Shapes. Affinity gives you tons of control over shapes. Cogs, donuts, stars, all sorts of stuff with tons of parameters to edit.
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Path separation and closing curves. It was super easy on Inkscape. I remember being able to break and rejoin curves almost anywhere I wanted. Affinity is a bit different, didn’t seem as intuitive but once you see how it lets you open and close paths it makes sense.
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Don’t use stroke width and fills together so much. I was using the crap out of strokes. Finally just turned it off and life got easier.
I learn by necessity really. I struggle to sit and learn something when I don’t have an application for it or an idea already. Which makes me a poor teacher unless someone has something specific to try and do.
If you have something you’re trying to do with it let me know and I’ll help. I can share a couple of my recent files if you’d like as well.
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Yeah. Here’s mine for the HT45 standard tips. I haven’t setup ones for the fine cut tips. This way I can pick the material, power and thickness for the project I’m working on and I’ve got the settings all done.
I haven’t measured the kerf for each cut so I’ve used a default 0.056" for all of them. That’s not likely to be spot on for every one of the speed/power/material combinations but unless you’re doing stuff that requires more precision, they should be okay. If you do run these and measure your kerf, I’d love to know what you measure them to really be & I’ll update my toolset.
I’ve spec’ed them by material (Steel, SS, Aluminum) and thickness. I also note if it’s running 30 vs 45A. For thinner stuff, the Crossfire doesn’t go fast enough to make the cleanest cuts on 45A so I go with the 30A settings (even so there are a few that HT specs for faster speeds but the 30A speeds are closer to the table max so that’s what I used).
As always, rename it by getting rid of the .DXF extension. Save it to your Sheetcam directory. You can open the toolset and then save it as your default.
If you use the other tips, you can modify these for the specs for those tips and then save the toolset as a Fine Cut Tip, etc. and swap between them depending on your job.
Hypertherm45 Std Tip CFPro.tools.dxf (9.0 KB)
Thanks! You’re the man.
Busy day today. Got my new plug installed for the compressor and built my loft. Came out great. Just need to add some walls to it to keep dust out.
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Just saw a status update on ups that a shipping label was created! It’s real!
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#12031 shipped water table yesterday, 43 lbs, box 3 of 3. Eagerly waiting on the other 2, and THC… 
Finally got around to installing your toolset @jamesdhatch. I may have done something wrong, I don’t see where it indicates the material the setting is for. I can just see the feedrate and power. I checked the notes section of the tool also and didn’t see anything.
EDIT Nevermind, I loaded them again and the materials pulled up with I loaded them. Thanks again! I’m running a few of my designs through to make sure. I’ve got a few things to cut once I get the table together!
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It’s on. Shop foreman will dictate break times. 
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If you get tired just mention how good ice cream would be.