10 x 5 foot plasma table build

[ned]

Hi all,

deep breath.... So I'm building a plasma table. I know that this is going to take me a while, I have a full time job and like drinking at the weekend, so whats left is two hours a night every weeknight.


I used to work as a professional welder, many years ago now, and maintain that as a hobby.

I work in IT so have some clue about the the computer aspect, though I have not used CAD type programs.

I mess around with electrics quite a lot, though cannot navigate a circuit board.

I can learn, and am pretty determined when faced with problems. Especially problems I'm interested in.

I make sculpture. I'm not intending to go into engineering, cutting parts for customers. Rather I want to make large scale sculpture, like the stuff you see along motorways or on roundabouts. That's why I'm going for a 10x5 table, I intend building huge stuff. Jeez im really looking forward to it.

But I have to get myself there. So let the problems begin!

No. 1 problem I was faced with is, that I had no way to make reliable, repeatable, perfectly square cuts.

So I looked around, and eventually bought a Femi ABS NG160, which i received last week. This -should- give me very accurate cuts.
It cut square right out of the box which is a good start.



I need to feed this with a roller table, so I'm building a 14 foot roller table now, with rollers I salvaged from an old set of gravity rollers.
The frames were out of whack but there are 37 good usable rollers, so will be fine for a 14 foot roller table. I bought steel yesterday for the roller table.



thanks for reading,
ned.