Canadian Water Table

We’ve come up with a Canadian water table for our CNC plasma setup.  Sometimes we have a tough time getting Liters (or Gallons for our American friends) of water into our shop in the middle of winter.  So we tend to improvise.

What do we have a lot of in the dead of winter in Saskatchewan?  Snow!  So we try to make use of it when we can.

We’ve found the snow actually does a similar job as water in terms of trapping smoke during the plasma cutting process.  However when cutting thin material cool down before cutting reduces the amount of warpage when doing a lot of intricate cutting, especially on thin gauge stainless.  The only drawback with snow is that when it melts the smoke trapping effectiveness decreases rapidly.

We don’t do this very often but when we get a nice heavy snowfall it just takes a few shovelfuls to fill the plasma table.  Only in Canada…