We did a copper job with a tracer nc plasma.
The shop said the 3/16 material was a bit of a pain as it conducted heat so fast. areas adjacent to the cut would heat and cause the material to move up into the cutting head.
They ended up cutting with the water table touching the bottom of the sheet to wick away the heat.
That worked fine.
I imagine a higher powered faster moving CNC would have less of a problem, as the heat input wouldn't have as much time to collect or expand it's influence.
. . . also, our pattern had a lot of adjacent holes and patterns, so the heat was applied and reapplied. I guess the cnc corollary might be to spread the cutting out as much as possible. Normal programing is to do adjacent parts and eliminate travel time. Here we might want to kill time between cuts to let the material stabilize. (or as they did, cool the plate with tangent water bath)
Gene Olson
Sculptor
Elk River, MN
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copper on plasma
We did a copper job with a tracer nc plasma.
The shop said the 3/16 material was a bit of a pain as it conducted heat so fast. areas adjacent to the cut would heat and cause the material to move up into the cutting head.
They ended up cutting with the water table touching the bottom of the sheet to wick away the heat.
That worked fine.
I imagine a higher powered faster moving CNC would have less of a problem, as the heat input wouldn't have as much time to collect or expand it's influence.
. . . also, our pattern had a lot of adjacent holes and patterns, so the heat was applied and reapplied. I guess the cnc corollary might be to spread the cutting out as much as possible. Normal programing is to do adjacent parts and eliminate travel time. Here we might want to kill time between cuts to let the material stabilize. (or as they did, cool the plate with tangent water bath)
Gene Olson
Sculptor
Elk River, MN