Anyone have (or access to) a small CNC plasma/water jet/laser cutter?

[Jarrett]

I'm making a bracket to mount my 15 gal sprayer to my ZTR mower and I need some steel sheet cut out. I already have some material and can do it myself with the few tools that I have (portaband, grinder, etc.), but I don't really have the time to spend on cutting these out. I got prices from a few local shops here, but they were all way more than I'm care to spend. One shop quoted $3+ for material and $80 labor (laser). I'm not saying they're out of line. These are large shops with large machines, so their overhead just to start the machines up is high I'm sure. I don't know of any other shop locally that is a smaller operation with smaller machines and lower operating costs. Does anyone here do this line of work or know of any place online that provides these services? I've attached a picture of the bracket.

 

[Fifelaker]

Have you got any community colleges nearby? Some high schools may also have them.

 

[CNC Dan]

what are the tolerances?
That can make a big differance on the price. If you can live with plus or minus 1/16" on most of your part it might lower the cost.
At work we often get prints that are over toleranced, and the cost goes up.

 

[yomax4]

Pretty Easy part. Find someone with a hand held Plasma and cut it out. Doesn't have to be perfect. Or if it does have to be perfect. Pay up.

 

[Jarrett]

Plus or minus 1/16" is fine. I don't know anyone with a plasma. Hopefully someday I'll have one myself.

 

[CliffordK]

It is relatively thin stuff.
You have a nice drawing.

I'd just cut it out with an angle grinder.
A little filing, and you should be able to get a fairly nice piece. The most difficult thing is working around the little ears on the end, and getting a nice radius rather than a V in the middle.

Ahhh, you need 4 of them? Well that is a bit of a pain, but still very possible.

I could probably mill it pretty quickly on my mill too, although, at this point it would take more time to do the setup than the actual project. That may be what your machine shop is also saying. Someone still has to program their CNC. $80 for all 4 pieces doesn't sound too bad.

 

[flyerdan]

Since there are only 4, I'd probably cut the blanks, rough out the V-section with a skinny wheel, then tack all 4 pieces together in a stack to do the drilling, radius, and finish work on the inside of the V. Grind the tacks off and deburr.

 

[JimRB]

If that was an Autocad file then the one CNC plasma cutter I saw you just feed it the cad file. Well I sketched it, the cad jockey spent 5 minutes in Autocad, and then we walked out to the plasma cutter, pulled the cad file from the folder, a few minutes later it was done. Of course you have a rather expensive machine that the shop will charge you to use, plus if your drawing is not the correct format they have to fix that.

 

[Brad_Blazer]

That quote seems in line. You could try a place like this: CNC Plasma Cutting
I don't know anything about them other than their web site. Your parts would ship easily.

If you spend 2 hours chasing a source, you could have them hand carved by then.

 

[Jarrett]

Thanks for the input guys! I did provide the ACAD drawing to all the shops, so all they had to do was import it to their CAM software and finalize the programming. I'm just going to try to make the time to do it by hand.