Plasma Cutters are Uhh-gly Machines!

839 Views 9 Replies 5 Participants Last post by Guest, Apr 10, 2001

Midlife

Discussion Starter · Apr 10, 2001

I tried a nice Plasma Cutter at welding class tonight, and it is very nice for cutting metal. For sheet metal, even at lowest settings, it is quite a bit of overkill. I could only get 1/8" wide cut, and ragged at that (lack of practice). I think a nice $200 air compressed die grinder would do much better than $1000 plasma cutter for working on cars. JMHO.

Getting much better at sheet metal welding. I welded up those nasty plasma cutter cuts as a butt joint. The instructor said if I could do that (and I was), then a nice, straight butt joint would be a piece of cake. Woohoo! Rusty frame rails: here I come!

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King of the Old Farts *struts*

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Torquewrench

· #5 · Apr 10, 2001

I've seen plasma cutters cut a lot thinner than 1/8". Being that your in a welding class I bet they get a lot of the heavy duty stuff. Youve probably already found that the classes usually focus on heavy plate and pipe and not so much on thin rusty sheet metal like us sicko's.

And $200 for a die grinder! I know you can use IR and CP, but I got my die grinder for $28 (DIvilbliss at Lowes) and it's still going strong. Spend your big money on a good impact driver, spray gun and maybe a DA. With all the other air tools, the cheapies do just as good

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