Scored steel but how do I slice it up

JTknives said:
Ben how do you like your hand of God I mean plasma torch. I think it's the way to go for this work.
As to the part time job, that's kinda right. My wife does not work and stays home so she wanted somthing to do to help out so I thought this might be good. I will do all the cutting and she can box and ship and email. I know lately 15n20 seams a tad rare so I thought this might fill a void and help out the people looking for this material.
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I'm very happy with it.

One thing I would suggest is a dehumidifier. It's a little thing you plug in between the air compressor and the machine to keep water vapor out of it. It can double or triple the life span for 30-40 bucks
 
If you were wanting options other than just plasma (which would probably be a little cleaner), an Exothermic cutting unit would work as well. It would probably cut through several layers at once.
 
I have about 800 lbs of the same type of stock (except mine is a little more rusty :-)... I use a HyperTherm 45 plasma. I am sure you could get by with a 30 for that stock. My real point here is that I have a couple of jigs, one to cut a 4 ft length into 6 inch wide slices and a second to cut the slices into 1.5 inch strips. Slick setup, kinda relaxing to spend an afternoon cutting up 15N20 strips. Have fun, you certainly have hit the jackpot.
 
I have cut up tons (literally) of this stuff. The only viable way is with a shear. I have a 1/4" X 10' shear and it works very well.
Jim
 
A shear will be the quickest, easiest, and cleanest, but also the most expensive. If I'm not mistaken you're looking at around $15k to $20k used, not to mention blade changes.

Also, they take up a large amount of space.
 
I had the local fab shop shear them up for me. Make sure you get someone who knows what they are doing though. I purchased 400lbs of band material and took it to the fab shop. They charged me $75 to cut 1.25 and 1.5" strips. Took less than an hour.

The next time I took 400lbs in the only thing different was they had to trim the teeth. One quick cut. Luckily I had a hard quote. They were not happy with the $200 I paid them. Apparently they had a new guy on the machine or something. It took 2 days.

Short answer is get it sheared. Just get it quoted first and make sure they have a fast machine.

Do not plasma cut it. I would not purchase plasma cut 15n20 for my Damascus.
 
I mostly plasma cut 51n20 for my damascus, from band stock. It takes a very little grinding to remove the burnt edges, especially when cutting clean and fast with a straightedge. I don't consider the time it takes to clean up afterwards to be onerous at all.
Another thing I have done, which works well, is to use the aforementioned radial arm saw with abrasive blade. But, the plasma is much easier yet.
 
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