-
Welcome back Guest! Did you know you can mentor other members here at H-M? If not, please check out our Relaunch of Hobby Machinist Mentoring Program!
A few of my CNC plasma cutouts
- Thread starter Gadget
- Start date
Pretty neat stuff,
I have a new manual cutter and am slowly learning to use it.
Your work looks high class and since I have had thoughts about doing some similar things I wonder what kind of investment would be required to get started. I'm too old to spend a lot of time building up a business to get my money back so would need an economy setup that might serve as a self supporting hobby. "Go cheap or stay home".
I would appreciate any info and thoughts that you might throw my way.
Thanks,
Jerry
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2011
- Messages
- 105
Jerry,
I built my table for about $1000.00 It has a wood frame which isn't as sturdy as metal obviously but for plasma that doesn't matter anyway. I used a motor and controller kit from HobbyCNC and bought my plans from http://solsylva.com/ My table working area is about 30X42". I use EMC2 as a machine control software which is free and runs on Ubuntu Linux, it does a great job. To generate the cut path I use SheetCamTNG. It's a reasonably priced program and you can get an eval version that will generate up to 1000 lines of code (I think that's the limit now) which is enough to do a pretty good cut.
Feel free to contact me if you have any other questions about my table or the process.
Dan
I built my table for about $1000.00 It has a wood frame which isn't as sturdy as metal obviously but for plasma that doesn't matter anyway. I used a motor and controller kit from HobbyCNC and bought my plans from http://solsylva.com/ My table working area is about 30X42". I use EMC2 as a machine control software which is free and runs on Ubuntu Linux, it does a great job. To generate the cut path I use SheetCamTNG. It's a reasonably priced program and you can get an eval version that will generate up to 1000 lines of code (I think that's the limit now) which is enough to do a pretty good cut.
Feel free to contact me if you have any other questions about my table or the process.
Dan
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2011
- Messages
- 8,032
You might want to look into 8020.com for some standard aluminum structural extrusion shapes that can make building a frame for this kind of project much easier. Kind of like an industrial erector set.
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2011
- Messages
- 105
Dave,Gadget,
Very nice,just as a matter of interest what material and thickness?
DaveH
Everything but the Bass was cut out of .080 aluminum. The bass was of steel cut from an old cheap metal cabinet that was no longer serviceable.
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2011
- Messages
- 105
8020.com doesn't look anything like the site you describe Tony.
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2011
- Messages
- 8,032
My mistake. I had just glanced over at one of their catalogs on the shelf and wrote .com out of habit. I should be more careful. It could get really embarrassing.
