Stainless THC and Cutting height, Hypertherm

[m79b01]

I am curious as to how everyone is cutting stainless. Just cut my first piece of 16ga SS and when setting up my Hypertherm 65 noticed the chart says .02 cut height and .08 pierce. I wonder why the difference from steel and aluminum. With the .02 setting I was cutting my part and the torch got too close (due to warpage and THC not reacting fast enough) and caused a reset on my Z axis limit switch. I don't think this would have happened with the normal .060 cut height. Hopefully I can get some insight. Maybe Jim will chime in too.

Also I was using the Finecut consumables with the slow cut settings.

[Gamelord]

Stainless is an alloy and it doesn't react quite the same with the arc voltage and such that normal steel does. Not sure the scientific details...but that is what I was told. Jim could probably give much more detail on it.

[jimcolt]

Cutting steel with an air plasma is two processes, exothermic oxidation of the steel (like an oxy-fuel torch) combined with the high temperature thermal (melting) process of the 25,000 degree plasma jet. Steel cuts best with an air plasma.

Cutting stainless is single part: Thermal cutting. In order to get the edge angularity as good as possible and to minimize edge roughness...the torch needs to run close and fast. To do the nest job on thin stainless you need a highly responsive height control, FineCut consumables and a machine that has excellent acceleration and high cutting speeds.

Jim Colt

I am curious as to how everyone is cutting stainless. Just cut my first piece of 16ga SS and when setting up my Hypertherm 65 noticed the chart says .02 cut height and .08 pierce. I wonder why the difference from steel and aluminum. With the .02 setting I was cutting my part and the torch got too close (due to warpage and THC not reacting fast enough) and caused a reset on my Z axis limit switch. I don't think this would have happened with the normal .060 cut height. Hopefully I can get some insight. Maybe Jim will chime in too.

Also I was using the Finecut consumables with the slow cut settings.

[m79b01]

thank you, Jim. It looks like I have some tuning to do based on your comments.