Weird wear on consumables - 45XP

Hi, looking for advice re some weird wear I’m getting on my consumables.
Thinking about the swirl of a burnmark on shield and electrode in the pics.
Eventually this will burn right through the shield, just didn’t have one of those handy.
What might be causing this?
Any thoughts?

what are you using to get dry air?
and what filtration set-up do you have?

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Are they Hypertherm or after market/chinese copy consumables?

@DannyD
@mechanic416 is right… if you are using aftermarket cheap consumables… they are known to cause issues…and George knows his stuff…and sells top quality consumables

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Three water traps/filters which has been sufficient during the winter. Summer is coming up in Sweden now though so the change in temperature might be a factor. Is this indicative of moist air?

Hypertherm only, wouldn’t dare to use knock offs.

The next thing would be to change the swirl ring, it may be getting bad.

You will see different performance out of your filters in summer vs winter. My desiccant lasted forever this winter. Summertime I was changing it frequently.

Already changed all of the pieces out but it still happened again.

Makes sense, easy enough to check the air quality.
But is this problem likely to be caused by moist air?
I haven’t seen any degradation of the cut quality which I thought was the best sign.

I have never seen water/moisture cause it to burn a hole in the side of a tip on a non-high frequency plasma cutter. I have seen it cause them to wear out real fist or cut off center.

If those are real Hypertherm consumables I would contact the Hypertherm dealer in your area and see what they had to say about it.

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Yeah, I think you’re roght. Trying their support is a good way to move forward!

That know as omic blow out that when you are piercing to low and multon plasma blows back into the inside of tip. If the steel has lots of milscale its make a mess
I run hypertherm XLR 300 high definition systems and it had this happen many times on piercing plate and it had to short of pierc delay and blows back upside
I use snippet in sheetcam to ramp in on piercing.

And it can causes misfire on the torch.

I had the same thing happen to me. one issue was the swirl ring and electrode where not setting correctly and there was small water viper getting into the system