CrossFire Pro Lessons Learned - Putting Langumuir Systems plasma cutting table to work at NTD Racing

on this tool tips episode of the journey to the baja 1000 we're going to do a part two of the langmar systems plasma cutting table and talk about the day-to-day operation with this amazing machine [Music] hey folks welcome back to tool tips and this part two of the langmire systems crossfire pro plasma cutting table well if you haven't seen episode 1 i recommend you go and check it out if you're looking to buy one of these tables in that episode i talk about what shows up in the box how i put it together by myself some lessons learned along the way and then also you get to see the first cuts in this episode i plan on talking about all those other things and i know everybody has got their different techniques for what they use but i'm going to show you what i use i'll show you the compressor that i'm using my storage for the tools i'll show you how i set it up how i cut with it and then at the very end of the day how i clean everything up so right now i'm getting ready to cut the upper arms for my jeep j10 off-road race truck which i'm planning to try to race the baja 1000 with let's take a look at how i get the whole thing set up and cut those parts so there are a couple things you need to do before you start cutting i'll just talk about them in in no particular order first off you got to get water into the table you can see how mess of the table gets like i think i talked about my previous video how was funny i was being really careful you can just see it does become a mess i'll show you at the end and how i clean it up and make it look good but it's never going to look like it did when it came out of the box i'm using a simple garden hose this wasn't even a full garden hose i think i might be the cheapest person on earth i found a piece of guard hose that blew out and i put a connector on the end i run it out the door to our faucet and i bring it right in here and i fill it up i usually bring it to about maybe within a half inch of the top of the slats for the the water table so let's talk about the air system here's what i got um i'll focus in here on the model in case you're interested in the model that i have you can take a screenshot of that uh i think i got this thing from amazon delivered to my house for about eight hundred dollars and it has been a good compressor it does everything i needed to uh there's been some guys who to talk about not having the supply of air let's say you're doing a long cut and you get maybe you know two minutes into the cut and the compressor kicks on does it have enough power to continually cut for a long a long time this one does i do watch the pressure and the pressure will get down to say maybe 110 psi it'll kick on and then you will actually see the pressure can start to build back up and the compressor will turn off it won't just run itself out of there so it's been a pretty good system i run it through uh this air filter it is one of the cam errors and of course i put it on backwards when i replace the filter there's the the filter if you're interested in which filter i have and then i run it just through this goodyear hose reel which i find works pretty good and keeps everything neat like everything else in my shop i put this thing on wheels i like it that i can move it around and clean up behind the compressor obviously there's a couple things i did extra on this you don't need to do also this thing runs off of 220 volt i did uh wire it myself you can find out online how to do that if you want to do that but i'm not a professional electrician it didn't work for me however but i am running an extension core this is a beefy extension cord which i run all the way back to one of my welders in the back so on the topic of air it is really important to have clean dry air when you're plasma cutting i'm again like i said using the cam air system there and they come with these filters i have two of them i pried off the very top of that filter i pried off the little metal piece you can open that thing up and then pour the beads into a pan to bake them and bake the water out of those beads all right finally i got nothing but love for landmark system they have a nice table i just wasn't a big fan of their computer mount set up so i have this set up i think i got it from husky so it's a a home depot buy and i these are a great deal sometimes you can find them home depot when i found these they were 69 it comes with a power strip on it i did make a mount in the back to mount the the plasma cutter so it stays on wheels with this things when i move around it all stays together it also keeps the all the electronic parts at least a little bit of a distance away from the control box to keep any interference it allows me to plug everything in here including the control box and what i really like about it is now when i am plasma cutting over here i can turn the table and orient my laptop such that it is protected from some of the spray and some of the splatter you get not all of it but it does i think a little bit better than that laptop stand they have from langmeyer system so this is what i went with and so far it's been working really well and also heck it gives me some storage too for the consumables [Music] here's a little bit of the learning curve when it comes to plasma cutting when you start out you got nice big beautiful sheets of plate still and then after a while you end up having a whole bunch of these things sitting around where you're like man well there's enough steel right here i could cut something here and cut something there i'll save this piece of steel and obviously i got a big piece over here so as you make your design in cad you really gotta start thinking about what do i have left to cut into and how i'm gonna nest those parts i know there's probably programs out on how to nest parts i don't know where they are but this is what i do so i measured this piece right here and obviously it's 48 inches wide but i i measured it and i have a space that's 21 inches long i'm cutting out some pretty big parts for the upper suspension arms so as i go over here to fusion 360 what i you did is i have all the parts here but i made a box that is 48 inches by 21 inches long and now i know that everything i'm cutting needs to fit inside that box so it's basically you know whatever you're making you just need to start thinking about what am i cutting on to and maybe you'll nest yourself just a little bit differently what's also important on the fusion 360 is once you get into the manufacturing or i'm guessing any other programs probably do this but i mean the fusion 360 was free so that's what i'm using um is where is the start point where does the computer think the zero point is going to be and it needs to be a point that you can identify on here and then you can also identify in your piece of metal sometimes it might be the center that will be the the zero point you set that up uh and you can follow the tutorials from uh langmeyer systems they do a really good job of showing you how to use this thing but there you go make sure you know where that's going to be able to identify that on your piece of metal such that it's useful to you okay for those of you who have not seen the langmar systems fire control software here it is and i've got my upper suspension arm in there ready to go now i just need to set the the head of the torch to the uh the corner where i'm going to start it so i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and start down here with this jog feature and by pushing the buttons i move the head of the cut up here torch around at about 300 inches per minute as i get close to the spot where i'm going to zero out all the axises i'm going to go ahead and slow that thing down by selecting 100 inches per minute and then now it makes it much more manageable and accurate to dial right in on that spot that i want to start cutting and there that looks pretty good right at the corner i'm gonna lower it down just a little bit yep that's good now i'm gonna go over here and click zero all accesses and that puts that start point right right i said it would at the beginning of the cut so here's my insurance right here i don't want to cut a piece of metal and find out i'm gonna run out of room so what i will actually do is i'll jog the cutter all the way to the limits and make sure that yup everything i'm cutting is going to stay inside the lines and you can see i come over here to the limits as i jog across the machine this might be a little bit of wear on the machine but i'm like man you it wouldn't take but go blowing through a couple uh sheets of metal before you actually pay for the machine so just want to be uh really careful to make sure that i don't i'm not gonna run this thing off of the metal and start all over again it all looks good i'll go back over here and say go to the x y zero it'll take it all the way back to the beginning and it'll be ready to cut okay so now we're ready to get to cutting so i almost need to write up a checklist because i think i forget this stuff all the time but i usually start with some kind of safety i use the number five glasses from miller to make sure i don't get any art burn to the old eyeballs uh and then so let's just take care of myself usually not too many sparks come off of this you might want to wear some closed toed shoes and those kinds of things have a fire extinguisher handy standard kind of stuff when you're welding then i think about the uh the plasma cutter is the plasma cutter on oh look at this don't have it grounded how many guys have started off and didn't have their uh park rounded i will generally ground this thing right to the metal i'm cutting just to get the best continuity for that arc um i know you can you can connect to the table but i have i have not cut anything where i didn't find that i could just i couldn't just uh connect right to the other pieces i'm cutting the air is on i've got plenty of pressure uh everything's ready to go i'm ready to start cutting okay so while this thing gets to cutting let me just uh say two good things i think about landmark systems first off is they delivered this thing within a week of the delivery date they were supposed to considering the current world situation i think that was awesome i was part of batch two and it was a week late and number two i had a comment on one of my videos that somebody wasn't pleased with the customer service and i think you got to have a little bit of a mind shift on how you deal with a company especially today they don't have a huge staff at least that's my impression to answer phone calls but they're great at social media they return my email right away and then also if you go to their forum most of your questions you're going to have are already answered on the forum and they're taking care of it i think you'll be happy if you go in that mindset okay let's go ahead and look at the results and then we'll go talk about settings what would i have here so this is the last part that was cut and i think it looks pretty awesome it's a little bit of dross left over on the part that's gonna be really easy uh to take out now the plasma cutter that i'm using is exactly the one that they sell on their web page from lang meyer systems i'm using the razer cut 45 it does have the torch i control it's just a plug and play i'm not sure about all the other plasma cutters but this one is super easy to hook up now when i run it there might be a better way to run it but this obviously isn't wrong because my parts are coming out pretty good i run it wide open i run it at 45 amps and then the air it figures it out itself off the compressor i'm sending about 100 psi to this thing and then it sets the pressure itself and what i do is i vary the speed of cut since i'm cutting 11 gauge here i just cut it 65 inches per minute if i'm cutting cutting 3 16 i've been running 45 or 50 and then when i cut the quarter inch plate i'm running 25 inches per minute and then when you get that razor cut 45 it tells you exactly what hypertherm consumables to get to replace it with the replaces for this torch today i did replace one of the electrodes and i replaced the uh the nozzle i find that the electrodes last about twice as long as the nozzle [Music] so i hope you all don't mind uh on a video or two ago i did a little segment about removing mill scale i'm going to recycle that video i think it's appropriate to put it right here because guys who are using langmeyer systems i think they can benefit from seeing that and so if you've seen it before another video i apologize you're getting cheated but here we go i'll show it one more time so before you start to weld on these plates of metal you really got to get rid of the mill scale according to jody on welding tips and tricks which i go to all the time if you want to tig well on this you need bright shiny metal and so how do you get down to that you got to take this mill scale off you can use an angle grinder with a flat disc and that will get it off but you'll find that removes a lot of the material and it's a lot of work you'll go through a lot of those flap discs before you get all the stuff off and you're ready to weld on it let me show you a better way and it's going to blow you away how easy it is to get rid of this metal scale so this is the chemical closet i have right outside of my garage and in this tub i have just a couple gallons of white vinegar and i just place the parts in there i try to make sure they're not lapping over top of each other otherwise the uh vinegar won't be able to react with the surface of the the metal and then it gets to work i also i'm not a chemist and i'm just hoping that vinegar and gasoline don't react into some kind of rocket fuel or something like that but so far it's been safe after just a couple hours the vinegar has done its work and now i can take it out and start washing the parts off with clean water and a brush this is one of those things i just wouldn't believe unless i was doing it myself i couldn't believe how the mill scale was just falling off this part because i was scrubbing it with this stainless steel wire brush let me give you one word of caution don't do this in your mom's sink because this stuff gets nasty and whatever gets on it is not coming off forever so just make sure you have a bucket or somewhere where you can rinse it and you're not going to destroy something in your house so here's a product that i didn't know existed and if you do any kind of metal work this tool belongs in your shop it is the bristle brush by 3m i'm putting a link for it in the description below if you want to get it from amazon now it's about 28 that's a that's an expensive part to go in your tool but just let me say compared to the flap discs i have this thing must last 20 times as long i've been through plates of metal like like crazy and i'm not halfway through the bristle brush just yet i do uh i am careful when i'm using it i try to make sure that the bristles run off of the part and not run into the corner and i think that preserves the life a little bit but as you can see it makes short work of getting the rest of the middle scale office and when you look at again the process to get the mill scale up just think about what i did i took a part i put in the vinegar it did its thing for a couple hours i didn't touch it pulled it out of the vinegar wiped it down with a with a stainless steel brush for a couple of seconds and then ran over run it over with this bristle brush and it is like shiny silver ready to be welded on just an awesome process i didn't know about before and hopefully you can use it while you're building stuff in your own shop so the last step to this is to hit the edges with the belt sander if it's a part that i'm going to be welding i'm going to make it square but if it's a part that i might bump into later on i'm going to round it off so it's smooth and it doesn't cut somebody so i clean my table every single time that i use it the first thing you have to do is get all the water out of the table and there's a bunch of different techniques i've seen guys just have some really amazing systems for emptying out the water table and this is what i have that same cheap hose i just reverse directions i connected here to the bottom of my uh home depot five gallon bucket i'll leave a link in my description of where you can find this fitting right here so you can tap it right into your bucket and then now the table is divided into two separate uh pieces you kind of see the split right here and underneath there's two drains so you do is take each one of those off one at a time and let the water flow right in the bucket [Music] okay so here's the last part about the clean out whenever you drain all the water there's a lip to this uh exit right here this fitting and the water can't get past it so you end up leaving a pool of water inside the table you can use a shop vac to get that out but if you have a shop vac you know that you have a wet bag or a dry vac as soon as you get water in this thing it's destroyed and it takes forever to clean them out so what i did is i went to home depot and i got this it was the buckethead now you can find this on amazon i want to say it's like 41 on amazon and i'm an amazon affiliate so if you order it on my i'll put a link in there i'd make some money off it but that being said i i found this for 28 at home depot so the bucket and and the uh the bucket head it does an awesome job let me show you how well it does at taking the rest of the water out of the water table [Music] [Music] so as you can see the water goes in the bucket the metal pieces get stuck at the bottom and the water feeds out into the garden now i wouldn't let the water go into any vegetable gardens like that but it hasn't killed in our plants outside so it isn't too harmful and all the big metal pieces are collected in here but it does an awesome job and for like 28 bucks i mean you can't beat this for uh for cleaning up the water table so here it is that's what's left after vacuuming it out a whole bunch of metal pieces down there i'll let this thing dry out throw it in the trash can but that is just not something you'd want inside your 100 plus shop vac i also had one person asked me uh to clarify what the wires do now this is also confusing to me because i didn't think it was really well written but this is what you get inside what i think is inside the box for the razor cut you're going to get these two cables this one right here is going to be for firing the torch it's going to go straight up and over into the control box and it's going to be the torch on and off wire and this one over here on the right side is going to go into your torch height control box from your torch height control box it is going to go into the torch height control cable location there on your control box also like i said if you just go with the razer cut 45 it is it really plug and play i don't i'm not sure the other guys are having to do to hook up theirs but these are just plug in a couple wires and it works perfectly all right for my previous video i just wanted to clarify my experience with the casters if you see here the caster is just a little bit bent as it hits the floor um i think to make that a little better if i just lower this foot a little bit more it would uh it would take the weight and then the weight would be in line with the leg but once you put the weight on the wheel it just bends a little bit and i think it's because of the spacing you kind of see there's a little bit of space here on this insert and there isn't over here a little bit closer so you can see it and that's because it's plastic inside of a piece of metal and just i think the best way to go would be to weld a plate and i've seen somebody do that i'll try to add that into my video well that's all we got for the second episode of the langmar systems crossfire pro cnc plasma cutter hopefully if you're making the decision to buy one i helped make that decision a little bit easier it's really cool i already had two guys contact me on youtube saying that they have decided to get one of the tables ever see in my first video i always think it's really cool that we can help each other on youtube that being said if you want to help me out if there's anything i talked about a tool or something like that uh i will put a link in my description below which will take you to amazon i'm an amazon affiliate so if you click on something it costs you nothing extra they give me a kickback and i can use all the help i can get especially since my wife's going to find out how much i spent on shocks for the j-10 race truck so to the langmeyer systems community out there if you're interested to see what i'm putting this uh plasma table to use for i'm building an off-road race truck because i want to race in the bottom 1000. it's been a dream of mine for years hopefully you'll join us on the next episode until then please don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button and we'll see you then take care of yourself [Music] foreign

Channel: NTD Racing

Views: 32,999

Keywords: crossfire pro lessons learned, plasma, cnc, table, cutter, budget, low cost, high quality, signs, steel, birds, off road, Langmuir Systems, CrossFire, CrossFire Pro, fabrication, welding, tig welding, baja 1000, score intertnaional, silverado, jeep, Jeep j10

Id: jAaCMGJNGXE

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020