In this episode, Jim Colt, an industry veteran from Hypertherm, talks about the differences between water table or downdraft fume control systems. MaverickCNC offers both water table or downdraft fume control systems.

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VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Jim Colt here talking about the Maverick CNC, this is the 5 by 5 CNC Cutting table. The nice thing about this table that we just installed is that it has the ability to handle fume control from the plasma cutting process in two different ways, either what’s called a water table, or water tray system, or with downdraft fume control.
So, we’ll talk a little bit about both of those, this particular one is getting set up with the downdraft fume control and we’ll have another video that actually shows the home-built downdraft systems, the blower that creates the suction and pulls the smoke out of this cutting table and just blows it outside out in the pasture on my farm here so… So let’s—what’s the difference between the two? They both serve a good function that’s to control the fumes that are produced by cutting metal, the fumes can be some smoke that’s produced by oils or the surface condition. For instance, this hot rolled steel, and the surface of the steel, has mill’s cale on it, that create some smoke, but also just the cutting process from the metal creates very fine particles of the metal that are very hot, and because they’re hot and they’re small they are sometimes lighter than air, and they’ll tend to billow up out of the table and fill your shop up pretty quickly with smoke—something you don’t want to do because it makes a mess. So with the downdraft systems, we’re basically creating enough of a suction underneath the cutting process that pulls those lighter than air particles out, pulse them through some ductwork and blows them outside. In some cases, in a large factory, you’ll have a big blower that might have some type of renewable or self-cleaning filters. That gets rather expensive on small shop operation like my farm shop here. We’re just blowing the fume outside; they quickly settle to the ground. It really doesn’t make a mess. They might if I decided to do some three shift a day cutting here, but that’s not gonna happen in my farm shop.

So, downdraft pulls the fumes down. The water table, on the other hand, you fill the table up with water. It obviously has to be waterproof. And the water comes up ideally right to the bottom edge of the plate and–so while the cutting process is going on we’re melting that steel, we blow it into the water. The water quickly quenches the cutting process and cools the particles and they sink down into the bottom of the table. Over time, you’re gonna have to remove the water from the table, and you’re gonna have to clean those particles out. It’s kind of a mess cleaning the table with the water table, where downdraft table will also have some material on bottom of the table, but it’s generally dry. You can kinda, pull it, rake it to one side, shovel it out of the table over period of time. So water table quench the molten metals, sinks it down to the bottom. If you lower the water level a little bit, you can improve cut quality. The water in contact with a plate can create a little bit of roughness or striations in the edge of the cut; that you don’t get with the downdraft table. Keeping the cutting process dry makes a little bit better. And also, you can get some bottom dross on the edge of the part: when water is in contact with the plate, it resolidifies the metal quickly and it reappears to the back of the plate, so more dross, more roughness on the edge of the cut, is another downfall, maybe, of the water table.

Now, each them have their advantages and disadvantages. The downdraft table pulling a lot of air out of your shop. So, if I had an air conditioned shop, which I don’t (I leave the garage door even door open in my shop most of the time) but, if I was cooling this place in the summertime or heating it in the wintertime, that downdraft is gonna pull some of the heat or the cooling process out of the building which makes the job harder for the heating, cooling operation, and obviously a little bit more expensive.
So water table has its advantages and disadvantages; downdraft table has is advantages and disadvantages. This particular one is gonna be downdraft, I like it because I get a little bit better cut quality from this process.