Carbon Steel Bracket Cutting On A 3015 Bed

A typical buyer for this application is a sheet metal subcontractor supplying brackets and mounting plates to agricultural and construction machinery builders. Order sizes run from tens to a few hundred pieces, the plate mix sits between 3 mm and 14 mm carbon steel, and the drawing changes with almost every purchase order.

• Plasma kerf and dross meant every edge was ground before it reached the weld bay
• Hole positions drifted enough that brackets no longer dropped into the assembly jig
• Short runs could not justify punch tooling that would be scrapped after one order
• Thickness changes through the day cost time in manual focus and parameter adjustment

• Bracket geometry is imported as DXF into the laser dedicated control system
• Parts are nested on the 1500 x 3000 mm sheet to reduce offcut
• Power and assist gas are set by thickness, oxygen for thicker carbon steel
• The auto-focus head sets focal position for the loaded plate
• Cutting runs under closed-loop servo control at up to 90 m/min positioning speed
• Parts are unloaded and slag is cleared from the slat bed between sheets

The bed is annealed and aged before precision welding to release internal stress. Positioning and repeat positioning accuracy are checked before the machine leaves the workshop, a secondary configuration check is carried out before the machine runs idle, and every additional component is counted before packaging.

Short-run bracket work becomes quotable again, because the cost of a geometry change is a new nest rather than new tooling, and the finishing labour that used to sit behind plasma cutting is removed from the process.