I've been playing around with my new plasma cutter and the first thing that I've learned is that I will not be cutting freehand, at least not any time soon. So I made a circle cutting guide that works really nicely and I was thinking about a straight cut guide, when it occurred to me: instead of moving the torch over the stationary material, how about moving the material under a stationary torch? It would work like a table saw. In fact, how about adapting an old table saw to a plasma cutter?
You could "rip" with it, or use the miter guage. Cutting to a line with a miter guage would be a lot faster than clamping a straight edge with the right offset. Cutting to a pattern would probably be easier with 2 hands guiding the pattern against the torch. Hey - you could have a #5 lens fastened in front of the torch for helmet/goggles free cutting.
It could have a water pan for "swarf" collection & fume extraction would be a lot easier with a fixed torch. If the fume extractor worked really well, you could use it inside! Foot pedal arc control. The torch would have to be easily removed for off-table use.
Limitations: really big pieces of material (4 x 8 sheets or 20' lengths).
But I'm a newbie at this plasma cutting thing and sometimes I get carried away solving problems that don't really exist. What do you guys think?
Thanks, Bob