tomrscott
Gold Member
In the continuing saga of my reborn Hypertherm 600 Plasma Cutter. I justified getting it largely to cut up a giant chunk of steel into tractor wheel weights for my deep dish R4s, so I needed a circle-cutting jig.
You can buy these for one or two hundred bucks from Hypertherm and other companies, but that would be almost what I paid for this the whole plasma cutter (remember that it was not working at the time).
So I "thunk" on it a while and came up with this: Mind you "pretty" was not at the top of my list of requirements, but I have 42 disks 16" diameter to cut out of a large plate of 3/8" steel plate, so it needed to be robust, and functional.
I decided that I wanted the torch head to swivel in the fixture so that it would be easy to follow around the circle, so I started with a large ball bearing that was a snug fit on the 1" torch barrel. Then I added a couple of snap rings to hold the torch barrel in place, welded a couple of 1/2" roll pins to the bearing, some 1/4" threaded rod through the pins, a block of 3/4" plexiglass on the other end of the rods to insulate it from ground, with some bronze bushings that are really overkill, and welded a threaded Tee-nut into a hole drilled in a large speaker magnet for a swivel anchor.
The next several pictures will show a couple views. I will probably have adequate weather to try it out tomorrow and I'll try to post some pictures of it in action then. Dry runs tonight seem like it will work great. /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif
You can buy these for one or two hundred bucks from Hypertherm and other companies, but that would be almost what I paid for this the whole plasma cutter (remember that it was not working at the time).
So I "thunk" on it a while and came up with this: Mind you "pretty" was not at the top of my list of requirements, but I have 42 disks 16" diameter to cut out of a large plate of 3/8" steel plate, so it needed to be robust, and functional.
I decided that I wanted the torch head to swivel in the fixture so that it would be easy to follow around the circle, so I started with a large ball bearing that was a snug fit on the 1" torch barrel. Then I added a couple of snap rings to hold the torch barrel in place, welded a couple of 1/2" roll pins to the bearing, some 1/4" threaded rod through the pins, a block of 3/4" plexiglass on the other end of the rods to insulate it from ground, with some bronze bushings that are really overkill, and welded a threaded Tee-nut into a hole drilled in a large speaker magnet for a swivel anchor.
The next several pictures will show a couple views. I will probably have adequate weather to try it out tomorrow and I'll try to post some pictures of it in action then. Dry runs tonight seem like it will work great. /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif