…said someone who isn’t me. 
We have an order for 33 of these yard signs for a customer (or a bunch of customers after the first one designed it and we put it on our website for sale to other people in their neighborhood area). Some might not think that 33 of something is a big order but when it basically pays for the machine, the torch, and the THC again I’d take it.
This is an OG Crossfire with an XL kit and a THC. We are using a Hypertherm Powermax45 with fine cut consumables. These were cut at 150 ipm at 40A out of 18 gauge steel (one of the pics should show the dross straight off the table). We cut them, ground down the dross, welded the legs, outgassed in our oven for 45 minutes, sandblasted each, then powder coated in a bronze from Columbia Coatings. The finished pic only shows 19 of the order (we’re not done yet) but they came out FANTASTIC. Our little Crossfire was just happy as could be to be cutting all day.
The patterning in FireControl isn’t bad but it certainly isn’t good for nesting. We couldn’t have fit more than 2 at a time anyway so I wasn’t overly worried. I did have to change the offset a bit since it wanted to overlap the top arch and the bottom of the next piece. Not a big deal, just set it for 1.5" spacing and it gave me enough room.
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very nice work…But 18 gauge at 40amps…wow…even at the 150ipm…seems like you are trying to move fast to keep up with the amps…and it may be causing more dross …
I cut 14ga at 120ipm at 35 amps…
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Just using the book recommendation on this machine.
I do not doubt your work…you might want to play with some scrap to see if you can save power and time with …
again…nice work…
I’m always down for suggestions if it helps! The amount of time I spent with the grinder on all of those was entirely more than I would have liked. The tree always had a fair bit because the details aren’t particularly clean vectors/paths but the letters I probably could have run a lot faster.
I will say that I think the machine was starving for air with our old compressor. We could immediately see a difference in performance without changing anything else.
It’s expensive to make nice stuff 
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how dry is your air…if you are pumping through that much air and cutting that much…what do you have for dry air?
Air is super dry thankfully. We have a Champion CRN series air dryer (that replaced that piece of crap Harbor Freight one [video of me talking about it here: and an inline water/oil separator from Matco.
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Also worth noting that having a much bigger and efficient compressor seems to be reducing the amount of moisture that ends up in there anyway. Look at this beautiful bastard:
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do you have an automatic bottom tank drain?
We did but we took it off after the 3rd time of it scaring the crap out of us (175 psi in the tank sounds like a shotgun blast every time it’d try and purge). Yesterday I just drained the tank every hour or so while stuff was in the powder coating oven. I’m going to find something less violent to drain the tank than the el cheapo one we have.
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Where is the compressor pump made? I have Schulz ADS20 and really like it. I know the company is from Brazil but my air dryer was made in Italy.
Nice signs.
Trees are always a processing nightmare for fusion360 and a thermal bridging nightmare for cutting out with the plasma.
Nice to see a production runs of something.
As soon as a sign has a tree on it should automatically be worth double. Lol. Always so much hassle for some reason with the evergreens.
I guess I’ll chime in on your parameters.
Being a contrarian I’m going to suggest doing the opposite of what to a @toolboy suggests.
Open that hypertherm up! let it burn carbon.
I would still use book settings,but I wouldn’t use the low speed settings. Here’s is a copy of the normal fine cut settings.
Myself I cut 14 gauge at 260 in per minute at 45 amps with standard hypertherm 45amp consumables. And I end up with very minimal dross coming off the table.
I think toolboy is running a Everlast 62 I so not very comparable versus a hypertherm 45 settings wise.
And it looks like you’re using fusion360 by the little glimpse of g code you got there I. The picture. When I’m setting up my 2D profile cutting toolpath I make sure I’m not using feed optimization but using smoothing. In the “passes” tab.
How fast can you run that machine? I think 300 in per minute it is the limit of the pro
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How are you doing with your Pierce delay on these signs?
are you setting it to .5 in fusion 360 and then dialing it back and fire control?
The book suggests .2
I know the fire control relays the minimum point .5 in post.
There’s a 14 gauge ubiquitous tree of Life.
it is 24 in in diameter.
This pictures from an hour ago.
All the closer shots are straight off the table.
I ran this with fine cut consumables
210 ipm @ 45 amp it is a hair above book speed but it seems to cut a little better than 200 ipm.
The places where you do see dross is usually because the thermal bridging or near a slat.
I do need to cut myself some triangle slats soon
I like to run fast on thin materials.
I find I got less dross.
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nice…would love that file…
