Laser Cutting – Line Cutter Projects

One of the things I think sets laser cutting apart from some of the other alternative methods to cut metal is one the flexibility, with the laser cutter you can put a flat sheet of steel up there and cut any number of geometries. Where if you go to a stamping outfit or a punch press operation.  You are more confined to the geometries that you have tools for or that your die is made for. So it gives us unique ability to put something up there that’s 2 inches by 2 inches in thin material, the very next part could be 6 foot by 7 foot and 3/4 inch material.

Laser Cutting

It is all also with the laser cutting, it is versatile, you can do a lot of different things with them as far as if you need to connect parts together, you can tab parts so that they interlock. Makes it easier if you are going to weld the parts together, you can also do line cutting in these parts where, if for some reason you can’t get to a certain part to bend it, you put these line cuts in you can bend it by hand then.

Line Cut

A line cut to Neil’s description, it’s almost like a perforation to a piece of material.  So if you have a note book and it is perforated down the edge for you to tear it apart.  We use that same concept when we apply it to metal, instead of tearing it apart we just use those areas to give us a defined area to crease that part. Say we don’t have the right tooling or it’s a weird geometry where we can’t get to that.  We can put it in a machine and if not for a better term get some vice grips and pull that up by hand verses having to put it into one of the press brakes.

Stitch Cutting

Stitch cutting is what we refer to with the line cutting, it looks like stitches when you put it in the material, which helps you be able to bend the parts in certain areas where you can’t normally get to. One of the other items I think, we may have messed up the terminology but common line cutting is where you have a part and you need 100 of the same part and it is the same exact geometry, we can link those parts together with a common edge, so instead of cutting the perimeter of 2 different parts, we are cutting 3 sides of the perimeter of both parts and then sharing the same single line down the middle so it splits them in half.

Our customers have come to us with pretty simple geometry squares, rectangles, that kind of thing and has asked us to do that which takes, depending on the length of part whatever that geometry that is shared between the two out of the overall cutting, divided by two parts so that is another benefit that we have here, that we can pass along to our customers if we have the part permits it.