Thread: Pipe cutting jig for plasma cutter

Recently I purchase a plasma cutter, and one of the things I wanted to be able to do with it was cut short ( 50 - 100 mm long) segments of 160+ mm steel pipe.
My bandsaw is too small to handle this size, and while I could take the pipe to work and cut it up with a large bandsaw or even use the big lathe, seeing as I have the plasma cutter in my shed I thought I would have a crack at making up a plasma cutter jig. I tried cutting the pipe holding the torch by hand but my hands are too shaky so the cuts were all over the place.

The frame of the jig is a simple "H" fame made of 30 x 30 x 2.5 SHS, the cross bar of which can be clamped in a vice
The 600 mm long x 45mm diameter steel rollers came from a skip at work and were originally from an X-ray film processing machine.
A length of "T-track" from an old car roof ram also becomes part of the frame and enables several stops and the torch holder to be positioned as required.

As the cut pipe goes around even a small amount of dross on the surface of the pipe that touches the rollers can cause the pipe to move and wiggle the cut so I partially sleeved the rollers with some short split PVC rectic pipe segments that keep the pipe and dross just above the rollers. If the PVC is positioned more than ~10 mm away from the cut they are not affected by the heat from the cut and even of they do occasionally suffer they are cheap and easy to replace.



Here's a view from the other side



Here you can see the grounding mechanism which is a piece of 1/4 steel rod bent into an L shape welded onto the inside of the pipe. Shallow notches are filed into the rod and ground clamp respectively which allows the clamp to rotate on the rod without coming off as the pipe goes around. This bit works well.



The semi-articulated arm is made from 16 mm steel rod and allows a range of pipe sizes up to 350 mm to be cut


How does it work? Well the roller bit works fine but I'm still on L plates with the plasma cutter itself and need more practice with it on plain cutting before I can really judge the rig itself.