Water depth, slats, and underwater cutting

Our borax doesn't go away due to evaporation, but we do lose some to drag-out when we're too impatient to drain parts and scrap in to the table.

Problem with borax is that it doesn't mix well; we've found heating up a couple gallons in the house and dissolving it works.  The concentrate can then be poured in the table and it mixes up ok during the drain/fill cycle.

I can not find Borax here, nor Boric acid, nor KCl, nor well anything really, even IPA i have to ask friends that own shampoo making factories for it.
But we have 18% HCl and 25% H2SO4 anywhere... and you can buy ammonium nitrate in 50KG bags for 20 Euro! With no permit or any paper!
I can not build a hobby rocket nor get rid of the bugs (every spring tiny flying ants, by the millions), but blowing up half a city is easy!

tommylight wrote:

I can not find Borax here, nor Boric acid, nor KCl, nor well anything really, even IPA i have to ask friends that own shampoo making factories for it.
But we have 18% HCl and 25% H2SO4 anywhere... and you can buy ammonium nitrate in 50KG bags for 20 Euro! With no permit or any paper!
I can not build a hobby rocket nor get rid of the bugs (every spring tiny flying ants, by the millions), but blowing up half a city is easy!

Just add diesel and perhaps a detonator and you will be golden! I once watched (from a distance) mud blown out of a dried up water hole with 6 bags of nitram fertiliser and a small stick of gelicnite to hold the detonator and the results were spectacular! Even more amazing was the guy was actually was still live. He hid behind a tree and fired the detonator with the battery from his tractor and a far too short (for me) roll of electrical cable. Car sized blobs of mud beside the hole!

Rod, i refrained from giving up such info.

My experience with my industrial CNC plasma table I designed and built is as follows,
 

• I would not recommend a water table for a machine that is used in heavy plate production as slag build up on the slats causes them to need frequent cleaning.
  
   
  
  
   
  
  • I tried multiple solutions to remove the top layer of slag but in heavy use it is only temporary.
  • In the end we ended up just replacing the slats every couple of months as the labor cost to remove and clean them far out-weighted the cost of replacement.
  • When I first built the machine, I incorporated slat mounts into the machine frame but as soon as we started using it for heavy production, we found it very hard to remove the slats to clean them. I rebuilt the slat support mounts and built removeable frames the slats mounted into. We would then crane the thee slat sections out with a forklift every other week to clean out the massive about of metal slag.
  • I was lucky enough that a fire hose reel was positioned near the machine to keep the water level topped up, but after I left the company, my replacement foreman experimented with different water level heights and found that for the air pressure of the Hypertherm Powermax 125 we are using, the water does not need to be at the top of the slats to remove the plasma smoke from the air.
  • I built a large under-table custom water storage tank and had it hot dipped galvanized. I found it very crucial to have a water storage tank to drain the water so the slag can be shoveled out. I spent many hours some days shoveling out slag into a large recycling bin and in heavy use the slag is heavier that concrete.
  • My next table will be a down-draft table as I have seen post on the forum showing how a baffle system can be use to reduce the required air flow suction to safety remove the plasma smoke.
  • I brought a refractometer to keep and eye on the plasma water solution concentration, but found that as long as I keep the water level stable and added trace amounts of plasma water table fluid, rust was mostly non-existent 
    
     
    
    
    
    
    I hope this helps someone as I learnt everything the hard way multple times.

Welcome back Arcsynapse89!