Controlling Operating Costs: Downdraft or Water? - Tips and Tricks with Jim Colt

In this episode, Jim Colt, an industry veteran from Hypertherm, talks about controlling operating cost; downdraft or water. Visit https://www.maverickcnc.com/ for more information on all of our plasma cutting tables.

Fume control while plasma cutting is extremely important. Jim runs through the operating costs and benefits of both downdraft and water plasma cutting beds. Should you aluminum over water and cut thin gauge HVAC duct over downdraft?

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Video description :

Water Bed Down Draft Table Operating Costs

Hi, this is Jim and I’m here with MaverickCNC. There are a couple of things that need to be addressed with every plasma cutting system and probably one of the most important ones or the most important one is fume control.

There are two schools of thought on it, either a down draft table or water table.

This is a water table. So what the water does when you’re cutting is, the actual fumes and the particles of steel that we’re melting and blowing away end up blasted down into the water table. As soon as those red hot particles of steel hit the water, they cool and when they cool they get heavier and they sink down into the bottom of the water.

With a down draft table a little bit different process, you actually have a blower that blows the air outside or into a welding fume filtration unit and the blower creates a vacuum underneath the table, the velocity of the gas drags those particles and cools them as it either gets blown outside in the form of smoke and some particulate matter.

So both are very good processes, they each have advantages and disadvantages, definitely need either a water table or a down draft table with a plasma cutter.

We’d fill this shop up with smoke really quickly if that wasn’t handled. Some of the other things that everyone’s concerned about with plasma cutting too is the operating cost. Many people look at it “I just spent three or four thousand dollars for a plasma cutter and forty thousand dollars for a CNC cutting table and how much is it going to cost me to run this thing?”

Well that’s one of the advantages of an air plasma cutting system is, the consumables, with the new technology we have today, last a long time. Especially with the Hypertherm Powermax series systems. I actually worked for Hypertherm for many years and the early air plasma systems that were developed by Hypertherm had a nozzle and electrode that would last maybe a hundred starts, that means a hundred pierces and you would have to change the nozzle and the electrode. It’s very common today to experience twelve hundred, seventeen hundred, eighteen hundred starts. And if you’re cutting three eighths inch steel or half inch steel that equates to about one cent per foot of cut on half inch steel, that’s a really low cost way to cut steel. That’s just the consumable cost, you do have to add in other things like the air cost as a small fraction of a penny to that cost and maybe secondary operations, if you have to do a little bit of grinding on your cut.

Things like that, that adds to the cutting cost as well but a very low cost cutting process, very efficient way to cut steel, stainless steel, aluminum and some other materials.

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