45XP INTERNAL MAINTENANCE

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RAD
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45XP INTERNAL MAINTENANCE

Post by RAD »

Hi, do you guys clean inside of your plasma units? i see no where is it recommended in my manual for the 45xp, I am asking because I noticed that there is black smoke metal powder at the inlet vents and was wondering maybe inside might have some of that metal dust also unless there is filter? It is not easy removing the cover of the unit and don't want to if I don't have to.

Also a very strange thing started happening and not sure if it is related to above but when I turned on the unit today the fan came on hard then died down then came back up like if the unit was hot. No fault codes or anything and the unit cut normal otherwise. Any ideas whats going on here? Please help if you can I'm a bit worried. TIA
plasmanewbie
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Re: 45XP INTERNAL MAINTENANCE

Post by plasmanewbie »

I am not sure if this is right or wrong but I do blow the dust out of my Powermax 65 from time to time. I don't go to the trouble of removing the cover, I just blow it out and its surprising how much actually accumulates over time in there.
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acourtjester
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Re: 45XP INTERNAL MAINTENANCE

Post by acourtjester »

You should contact Hypertherm about your problem and find a way to control the plasma dust, or you may start losing more tools to conductive plasma dust :( :o :shock: Preventive maintenance is better the corrective maintenance :) and is mostly cheaper in time and money.
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RAD
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Re: 45XP INTERNAL MAINTENANCE

Post by RAD »

Thanks guys, I am using a water table to control the smoke but it is not 100 percent effective.

I have emailed hypertherm and the tech engineer responded very quickly, his response:

"Thank you for the detailed description of your system. I think you are on the right track when you said there’s black powder building up near the fan. The fan inside of the Powermax45 XP doesn’t have different speeds. Instead, it is controlled as “fan-on-demand” where the temperature sensor tells the fan to turn on or off based on pre-programmed temperature thresholds. Typically when the fan begins to run a bit more than usual, especially at startup, this means there is dust buildup inside of the machine. My recommendation is to remove the cover on the machine and then use the filtered compressed air to blow the dust out of the fan assembly. Once everything is clean, resume cutting operations to see if the fan behavior has improved.

Since you don’t have any temperature errors appearing on the front panel, I would be skeptical of the temperature sensor causing you any problems. Also, the sensor seems to be successfully passing a signal to the fan through the board to start cooling the components during cutting, so I think we can rule out issues with the board for now. Attached to this email is an excerpt from the Powermax45 XP service manual regarding testing the fan for proper operation. If thoroughly cleaning the machine does not help, then I would perform the test in the attached document."


I am going to try his recommendation, so I guess it is recommended that you should clean your system internally with clean compressed air, one tell tale sign of when you should clean is when you see the black powder build up at the fan inlet vents I guess.
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