You can cut real intricate shapes with a C&C plasma cutter,
but all I have is a regular plasma cutter
so I thought, why not use a pantograph to do the same thing.
What gave me this idea is this router pantograph,
which I've used for many things that you'd normally need a
C&C router for, and so I took this design
and adapted it to fit a plasma cutter torch
right here. I'm starting with
some wood from my own saw mill, and I'm jointing it,
and planing it, and table-sawing it, until I get some nice
straight pieces.
So, now I have most of my pieces of wood cut to size.
Now, I want this gap in here to be, maybe just
half a millimeter, so let's measure how much
I've got in here, and then I'll cut
this piece just a bit wider. I added half a millimeter
to a measurement, and now I just need to set the fence to that.
I always save thin strips of wood like that
cause they make great glue applicators, I need holes
exactly one and a half centimeters from the ends
and I'm using my caliper, set to one and a half centimeters
to score a line. I then set the caliper to
half the width of the pieces to mark it laterally-centered.
And, after that, I use an awl to make a divet at the intersection
of the lines.
Now, this part here is wider in the middle
so I can put the plasma torch through it without
cutting away everything, and now I just need to
cut away these pieces here,
and I jigged that cut-up on the table saw.
And, then I finished the cuts on the bandsaw.
And, then I cleaned the cuts up a little bit with a knife.
Before gluing it together, I am chamfering all the corners just
a little bit, which makes the pantograph much nicer to touch.
I don't usually show this step in my projects,
because it's not very interesting and it's not
strictly necessary either.
For gluing the links together, I am just gluing them together
one piece at a time, that way I can worry about the alignment
when I'm only gluing on the last piece.
The holes I drilled are, kind of, a tight fit for the shaft,
so what I've done is I've cut a notch out of the end of one
of the shafts so I can use it as reamer to expand the holes
a little bit.
So, it's really important that the rods on the end
are square with the sides, and I'm pretty lucky here,
these are square to begin with.
So, my clamps forced this out of square just a bit,
so I'll just bring it back in.
Now the ends of this part here need to fit
around another piece here, and to make sure I'll
have a little bit of room in there, I'm gonna cut these down
a little bit on the table saw, here.
I still need a bracket to hold the back of the pantograph
and that's gonna be made out of these three pieces,
like this, I just need to drill the holes in it.
I still need to figure out how to mount the plasma torch
in here, and I figure a hole this size
should be big enough.
So, that torch needs to come through about
this far, and I figure it's best if I make something
to support the handle, out of this block, right about here.
And, I made another block to go right here.
I only screwed these blocks on, cause it's not unlikely
that I'll change my mind how this torch will mount.
With this just being side grain over such a small area,
it has a good chance of breaking which is why I'm adding
a reinforcing screw before it breaks.
Whoops.
Now, this holder for the back of the pantograph
is gonna tilt on a couple of pieces of shafting
and I'm gonna make a holder for that, and I'm gonna
bridle joint these pieces together.
Now the quickset tenon jig is the best way to make
a bridle joint, but I'll show you how to make one without.
Well, this is not as accurate as I was hoping
it would be, I normally don't have to tweak the joints
so I really should have used the quickset tenon jig for this.
I offset the holes a little bit to bring this up, so I have
room to tilt, but I'd like to be able to tilt back a little bit
further so I can lift the pantograph off the sheet metal.
So, I'm gonna have to cut a little bit off, right here.
The pantograph's follower goes in here, and I can adjust
that up and down, but I need to clamp it this way
so I'm gonna use this old furniture foot,
and a couple of washers, and a T-nut, and that'll clamp it.
I had been experimenting with the pantograph on the
floor, but I realized I needed some kind of set-up to
hold the stock very well, and my template.
And, the other thing is, this button here is, kind of,
inconvenient to reach, so I made another button.
And this button is just a little micro-switch on a long cable
and it plugs into the control wire, I added a little jack
on here so I can control this from here.
And, here's the results from some of my experiments.
This is the bottom side, and apparently this is cause I was
cutting way too slow.
Well, that's better, I still got quite a bit of beating
on the edges.
Well, I think this time I went fast enough, because
it barely came out.
Wow, these gears actually work.
Well, that's way better than I could have done free-hand.
So, some of cuts have gotten a minimum amount of slag
on the bottom, some of the other ones, a lot more
and I guess it's just a matter of getting the speed just right,
and the distance to the metal, and this is
where a C&C plasma cutter would have the advantage.