In this episode, Jim Colt, an industry veteran from Hypertherm, talks about how to make a fume control system for your MaverickCNC Plasma Cutting Table. Jim takes you step by step on how to build a downdraft fume control system by yourself, on a good budget.
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VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Ok, so every time you install one of the systems in a shop, there are systems that have to support the plasma cutting and the cutting of metal of general with the machine. There is an air compressor system, there is treatment of the air, we’ll talk about that a little bit, but let’s start out with the fume control system.
On this Maverick CNC cutting table we’ve chosen to use downdraft fume control, so we trying to pull the smoke from the cutting process, and the smoke is actually produced by the surface condition of the metal we’re using sometime there’s some oil and so forth on the metal but the metal itself we’re running at twenty five thousand degree arc that actually melts through the metal so there’s gonna be some smoke and fumes, and those are gonna-because they’re hotter and they’re lighter than air, they’ll actually rise in your shop and fill the shop up quickly with smoke.
So, downdraft, on this one, ductwork is done in the back-it’s a rectangular duct-I actually made these on my old CNC plasma cutting table and the duct goes underneath the table over on this side, gets pulled out and on the outside of the building here I actually have a blower system. Interestingly, I like to get good deal on things so, I actually looked on Facebook Marketplace and I found a restaurant equipment-it was going out of business-so, this is an old restaurant fan that was actually used to supply make up air for the restaurant for their heating and ventilating and air conditioning system. It’s actually, ideal for what I am gonna use it for here, so let’s turn on the fan blower, we’ll walk out around, and we’ll see what a fume control consists of outside of the building.
Let’s take a look, you can kinda see a couple of eight-inch galvanised pipes coming through the wall-that’s directly from de ductwork-and there’s a vacuum in those pipes you can see is connecting to a box over on this side. This box has a large squirrel cage type blower and it’s creating a suction on the fumes. The fumes do a lot of cooling has they go through this ductwork then even a hot Nord Carolina day. But it goes into this and just blows out of the louvre on the other side of the table. Now, the fumes don’t mushroom up an into the sky and create a, you know, create a serious problem with the neighbor and things like that, they rather-they just… they’ve cooled off enough so that they’re heavier than air and they blow out the other side of this fume control fan unit and just sink to the ground it really doesn’t make much of a mess, I’ve been involved with these for a long time so… Now this, interestingly, this box has been around for a while, it was on a roof of a restaurant in local town here that went out of business. I found it online on the Facebook Marketplace and I paid fifty dollars for it, hooked it up to some power, connected the pipes to it, duct it to the cutting table and boom I’ve got a down draft fume control system on a good budget I guess so…
Anyway, let’s just take a look at the inside, if you wanna… Look at this squirrel cage fan, very well constructed, made it run for years in a restaurant application. It has a totally enclosed fan-cooled motors, so any dust that does get in here… If we look at it in six month, it’s gonna pretty dusty, probably, on the inside, but you need a motor that’s protected from the dust in order to work correctly.