Making a plasma cutter go.

[Madison]

So, as some may recall, our lab recently acquired a plasma cutter. Mike, the 'owner' of the lab, doesn't have much time to play with it and so we're seeing really inconsistent results from the machine and so I thought I'd check with y'all and see if you or someone like you can help us to get the thing running reliably.

The cutter was ordered from DynaCNC, a company located not far from us in Seattle, but they've not been very helpful, as I understand things. It is controlled using a proprietary hardware interface, again as I understand, that itself is controlled by software called Mach 3 . We've been using SheetCAM to generate the GCode, but we also have MasterCAM 9.1 and X.

I don't have a specific question, I suppose, so I'm trying only to gather resources or knowledge about what we need to know to make this tool work for us. Among the issues we've run into are the exceptional amounts of dross that we often see while cutting parts. Mike's tried calibrating the machine differently for different metals, alloys and thicknesses, but we can't seem to get the machine to repeat good cutting performance later with those settings.

I'm poking around on cnczone.com, but if any of you fine folks have direct experience with tools of this sort, I'm asking politely to nag you to death until ours works