Is a Plasma Cutter for you? Our experience with the Langmuir Crossfire Pro and Hypertherm 45 XP.

hi it's rich from lowendesign today we're going to talk about our cnc plasma cutter this is a crossfire pro cnc plasma cutter and it's from a company called langmuir systems i think they started out as a kickstarter i'm not really sure i bought this one before it was even released it was just still uh they were in the final stages of the design and they put it up for sale so uh it took maybe three four months before it arrived took about a day to assemble it we did it over a couple of days but one day of assembly time came with all the parts really clear instructions videos everything was really really clear and easy to put together has a stainless steel water table it has good motion control when you're doing something like this a machine that's going to work in a dirty environment you want something that the parts will roll along and won't get clogged up and all that with the dirt so this is well designed for that it's got a z-axis or z-axis as some would say so it goes down and detects the torch height automatically and then backs off and it has torch height control built in so that as you're cutting something with a warped piece of metal the torch will actually follow along on that warp and keep the exact right height and i wasn't sure we needed that but it's uh we find that a lot of the metal once especially when you cut some parts out the metal gets kind of warped and you want to keep a very accurate torch height to get good cuts so that's a really really nice feature we're using it with a hypertherm xp-45 plasma cutter and we got that uh separately and i got the version that has a machine torch as well as a hand torch and so we can use the plasma cutter by hand and we can just hook it up here on the machine and we've been very very happy with the hypertherm xp45 it's been a absolutely fantastic uh plasma cutter and when when you're cutting you have uh as it cuts it leaves a rough edge on there that you have to grind off and so there's a lot of different settings for each thickness of metal and to to minimize that and to give you good accurate cuts and reliable cuts and there's a tables of the the settings that uh hypertherm recommends and we just entered that into the software and it just cuts great very very minimal grinding [Music] when something comes out of the plasma cutter this is a part where it didn't complete but you end up with a edge along here you can sort of tune how much of an edge you get by tuning the power that you use in the plasma cutter and the speed of the cut and whatnot but you just go over it with a angle grinder and this whole piece will often just break off as one piece here's an example when we're designing something this part wants to fold and it's a bit thick steel for our bending break so you just can go along and put some uh basically some slots or some feature in here that makes it so that you have less steel to bend but it's still the resulting thing will be strong enough this is a bracket to hold a keyboard tray so uh so you learn when you're building things the little tricks for like just putting some slots in when you want to do a bend and that also tells you where you want the bands um another thing i've seen is uh i'll put little triangles in let's say i wanted to do a bend in the middle here where would that be and i would just go in the cad put a little notch put a little notch here and that just gives me something to line up when i put it in the bending break to see where i'm going to want to do that bend so you can help yourself and just put those features into your design and that helps you fabricate the product so one of the things we figured out when we installed our langmuir plasma cutter table here is we need to fill this with water and it evaporates out over time especially seems to do so in the winter and so we have a bathroom down there we would go and get water and five gallon buckets and bring it out and pour it in and that just got it annoying so uh we put a hose on the wall right here just ran a pecs pipe over and we use that for filling it and one thing with the langmuir table is the drain fitting on it is quite small and is above the level of the water so a lot of people suggest putting a dimple in the bottom of the tank as you're first installing it and that lowers the level of the drain and even putting in a larger drain fixture but honestly we find that just in normal use we'll come by and it'll be evaporated and it's easy enough to clean out and then we can just fill it with water again and off you go so water was a big thing that we figured out with this the air supply is another one we have a ginormous air compressor and we're quite a ways away from it so you still do get moisture in the line we have a thing here for scrubbing the air i'm not even sure if it gets rid of moisture but moisture has not really seemed to be a problem for us yet although it's one of those things i expect it apparently cuts down on the life of the consumables quite a bit so you want good filtered dry air and a lot of people put in special mechanisms for drying the air and all that so we haven't had to do that yet one of the things we found was that when this machine is going if you're cutting quite a lot for thick steel you can generate quite a lot of smoke in the shop yeah our shop is quite a big room so but it was still an annoying problem and so uh we built a uh air filtering device so basically a box with four air filters one on each side so you have a lot of air flow and then a very powerful fan and some suction on it and we use that when we are using the plasma cutter and when we're doing welding and one thing i did on that was i took some stainless steel screen and i put a few layers of it sort of separated over about this much i put different layers of screen and that's designed to catch any sparks that come through to catch it in there so that it doesn't go into the box and cause a fire i think it's incredibly remote that possibility that it would do that but better safe than sorry but having the air cleaner running while you're using the plasma cutter is a really really good idea you could have a big vent fan fan over event hood over the whole thing would work very well too and this thing when it's going it's it you just sort of point the the air fixture sort of in the area where you're going to cut and off it goes so that works really really well with our version of this we i added a mount on the side of the machine and a touch screen monitor so that we can control the machine uh via the touchscreen and i bought the keyboard kit that langmuir offers so we have the keyboard there and that gives you a nice little spot to put a pair of pliers or whatever and uh we mounted the computer underneath that keyboard tray so that's a very convenient spot for that i wanted the computer up and out of the way one thing this machine does is it spews a lot of smoke and water as it runs and so it's not something you would want to run in your living room at home the langmuir systems people have built some software called fire control and a lot of these machines were originally run with mach 3 or mach 4 software the fire control software is specifically designed for these machines and specifically designed for plasma cutting and it's nice it works on a mac os 10 it works on windows so whatever systems you use it works fine just plugs into your computer with a usb port and the software it had a couple of rough edges when it started but each release is getting better and better i mean it was it was perfectly workable and usable when it started and then as they've been developing the software they've added new and new new features all the time and we've found things like the ability to start a cut at anywhere in in a job is nice sometimes it'll cut and the torch will be lost for whatever reason you can just say no i want you to restart here and you can do that very very easily with the software the one thing that we don't like about it is that it has these confirmation dialogues that show up all the time like when it uh you want to load a new uh design in it's like oh are you sure say yes i'm sure i just click that button or when the job is finished it puts up a modal dialogue right in the middle of the screen and you have to close that before you can do anything whereas it just breaks your workflow all these silly dialogues so that would be something that i would just obliterate right out of there or leave in there at first and then have a check box that says get rid of these horrible annoying dialogues so it's one of our pet peeves in the shop here the workflow that we use we have there's two of us who use the machine generally chris uses it with fusion 360. so he does the design there and then there's a post processor that you can get for fusion 360 and it just creates a file that will go right into the plasma cutter and that file the post processor is provided by langmuir systems and download off their site and so that is a very very quick and easy way to do it and that there's there's some little things you got to figure out there i think there's some issues with construction lines you you can't have them there you have to hide them i don't know if it's you had to hide them on a different layer or something like that but anyway you had to be very careful about that i tend to use a vectric bcarve pro and i use that a lot with the cnc rotor so i'm very very familiar with laying out patterns on that and for me doing the design in vectric is very fast and then i get the design i design it one to one and then i just export that file as an svg file from vectric and bring that into uh sheet cam and again language systems provides a post processor for sheet cam bring it right into sheet cam off it goes processes the thing and you have the the file you need for the the plasma cutter and so i've tried a few other things anything that can create an svg file or a dwg file so fusion vectric inkscape affinity affinity designer adobe illustrator all these tools are very very easy to use you just have to figure out when you export the svg and you import it into a sheet cam you have to think about sometimes you have to scale it sometimes the scaling will be it'll be in millimeters or in some other units like picas or pixels or something and you just have to figure out the scaling so that you get the objects the right size and that's easy enough to do draw a one inch box and then bring it into the sheet cam and when you import it you'll see you can you can do a measure in sheet cam and see how big it is and just adjust things until you get an inch by an inch box and you're good so we do our designs on different computers and we have a single shared directory here on dropbox we just from whatever computer we do the design on we drop the the g-code file into that directory it shows up here on his computer and we work with it and one of the things that we figured out is that you want to do your your cut path so outer cut paths are clockwise and something inside is done counterclockwise so cutting out something like this you want to go clockwise around the outside and that's just the way the air swirls through the plasma cutter and you get a better edge that way and there are some settings in sheet cam that will allow you to configure it that way they're not perfect not you know not as awesome as i'd like sheet cam is one of those programs where it's not intuitive and you have to fuss around with it but there are some people who have made excellent videos for it and those are we'll just sort of go through the whole thing how you use it and and all that and of course they just did a major release in the last week or so so it's a program that hasn't changed in years and then it's a big release so we'll have to learn some of the new features that are in there but it looks pretty interesting so far one thing that you find is there are libraries there are websites that have designs for uh plasma cutting devices or plasma cutting plans and one of them is i think it's called fire share or on it's on the langmuir systems site and you can go there and there's just tons and tons of designs with things and people are uploading designs all the time another one is a plasma spider and i think you have to subscribe to that one but there's uh hundreds and hundreds or thousands of designs and and sometimes the the designs are uh actual source files or sometimes they are uh ones that the the g-code output that would go straight to the machine see in that case you have to you know uh rely on the fact that they've chosen the right settings for the for york plasma cutter and and whatnot so what you really really want to find is uh is designs that are just the raw uh svg files and that's the the best case scenario then you can just use uh your own like sheet cam your own tools to process it and create a file that you're happy with and you can adjust the tuning too one thing about having the plasma cutter is it's a whole new way of thinking when you're designing items for the shop and my my first thought is oh i need a piece i'm going to go to the mill i'm going to you know design it up i'm going to drill all the holes and mill out the shape of it or i'm going to start using shears or cutters or whatever to build a part and when you realize that you have this and you i i've it's happened to me it still happens to me i'm going to build a part and i think oh i got to go into the shop and start doing it it's like or i could just design it and cut it on the plasma cutter and that's often literally i've come downstairs here and sat at my computer and within five minutes have designed the part saved it onto dropbox over there it shows up on the computer here just come over here load it and click go and have a part cut out here's it an example was a bracket to hold a zeroing sensor for a hall effect sensor and this you know i mean it's an absolutely trivial part but if i was doing it manually i'd have square corners i'd then be filing them off and trying to make them round but it's just so easy to go in on whatever drafting tool you use or cad tool and just put in rounded fillets on the corners uh get the exact right dimensions and you have the part and then later on i realized i wanted one that sort of went that way and so i just took this little part stretched it longer and you can iterate and have a whole new part in just a few minutes so you can play around with it do one no try this one no make it a bit longer shorter however you want it it absolutely changes the way that you build the the parts and components for the projects you're working on and the first example of that was soon after we got it we have a uh a saw that we use to cut uh the uh long long metal pieces it's sort of a a slower speed uh uh chop saw it's designed for metal work it's a dewalt thing and we had a portable stand for a wood version of it and the wood version and the metal version just have a slightly different layout of the holes and so we needed an adapter plate where we could put the plate down bolt it onto the holes for the wood one and then the holes for the metal one would be there and just put it on so we needed a piece of steel about this big i think we cut it out of 316 steel and we just needed it we just needed eight holes in it at a certain spot so it was literally uh yeah a matter of a moment to measure you know the distance between the holes go in lay them out on the four corners of a rectangle [Music] and two rectangles cut that cut a plate with rounded corners and we had a piece to mount the uh the chop saw and it was probably 10 minutes from beginning to end and just something that was so quick and fast when we thought about it and then the other end of the scale is doing a more complex project we built a welding table and it was covered in 5 8 inch holes and has tabs and slots that fit together so that you have a dead flat surface and it has a edge around the outside so that had a ton of holes in it a ton of tabs and slots and all that and uh was a very very complex design and took quite a while to do but uh and you wouldn't have been able to do that without something like a plasma cutter or it would have been incredibly tedious to drill all the holes and so that that's sort of the other end of the scale but it really really just changes the nature of things in the shop so that's a quick overview of our langmuir systems crossfire pro plasma cutter it's one of those tools we never knew we wanted now that we have it i'd absolutely have one in any shop i was working in a fantastic tool saves time and allows us to make things very very quickly and precisely and easily it's just so it gets means that we our whole shop operates more efficiently so it's been a great tool for us [Music] and one of them is uh and so uh uh it's uh um uh and um that uh and um and um as um and uh so we have a so uh and uh um and uh and so uh we built a uh uh and uh and uh it's a very uh uh uh uh with uh i

Channel: Loen.Design

Views: 3,489

Keywords: art, maker, ottawa, artist, cnc, makersmovement, makersgonnamake, cncrouter, banana, design, modernism, woodworking, metalworking, machining, woodworker, handmade, plasmacutter, lincolnelectric, hypertherm, langmuirsystems

Id: AkjXIfejriU

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021