Please help!

I am a marketing researcher for a plasma cutting equipment manufacturer and I have some industry related questions that I would like to have answered. We are always looking for ideas for new plasma cutting equipment, so whatever you can tell me about your business, I'm all ears! I am looking for your expertise! Please help!



Question 1: Do you use plasma for cutting metal in your yard? If not, what do you use instead? If you do use plasma, when do you use your plasma cutter (how often do you use it)?

Question 2: Is there a shift away from oxy fuel cutting and plasma cutting (torching in general) in scrap yards these days?

Questions 3: Would you purchase alligator shears over a plasma system (assuming they are the same price)? If so/if not, why?

Oxygen/Gasoline system

First off... I would like to say thanks for being honost about who you are and why your here... We appriciate honosty...


as for cutting:

I am a home based scrapper... I don't have any cutting tools at home outside a grinder, sawzall, and chop saw... would prefer to have both torch and plazma tho for various reasons... I like to build and fix things....

At my work we have both.... Plazma is nice for repetative cutting and no-wait heating... pull the trigger and you are cutting

The torch is nice because it's portable and not dependant on a power and compressed air supply.

for the record, our plazma is a hypotherm 1000

First off... I would like to say thanks for being honest about who you are, and why your here... We appreciate honesty...

Also a home based scrapper. I have never had the privilege of using a plasma cutter. The quick precision cuts would quite handy in my hobby, but I don't really see the practicality of it for my work. The easy portability of the oxy/acetelyne setup works well for me. Reciprocating saw, grinder and a hand operated shear.

1. No...oxy/acetelyne torch

2. With more large scale shredders coming into play, probably.

3. No, the hand operated shear is quite sufficient for my operation. A power one would be overkill in a huge way for me. As I mentioned, I would use a plasma cutter, but probably not enough to justify the expense.

I'm a home based scrapper. If I could find a good deal on a plasma cutter I'd be all over it, but these outfits want too much for what it is.

Thank you so much for responding to my posting. I really appreciate your feedback. Any bit of information you can give me about your industry/hobby is very helpful for my research. Keep the ideas coming - let me know if there's anything else you feel like I should know about plasma cutting/torching in general as it relates to the metal scrapping industry.

Thanks again!

How do you like your Powermax1000, how long have you had that machine? I actually am a market researcher for Hypertherm. Thanks for responding to my posting too! I am just looking to learn as much as I can about the metal scrapping business. I would really like to understand if there is any opportunity for plasma to become more popular for your industry or if the general trend is to use shears and shredders because they are starting to cost less these days.

Since you asked, my hobby is demolition derby. Alot more time and money goes into these cars than most folks would suspect. Sure there are always a few locals that will take out the glass and go. You will generally notice that they are the ones who are sitting dead in the water in the first couple of minutes. I take my cars somewhat seriously. A plasma cutter would be ideal for fabricating motor mounts, bumper brackets, header flanges, select cage pieces, shifters, engine cradles, and a few other goodies.

Just a suggestion: check out wecrash.com, a demo derby forum with 70,000+ members. Alot of them take it more seriously than I do, and there are alot of professional fabricators there, including pros that sell the parts I mentioned, amongst other derby goodies. My car number and user name there is C4. Not that it is relevant, but I do moderate 3 sections there. There are more precision made after market parts specialized for derby than you could probably imagine. Most of the pros making these parts are using plasma or cnc.

I am also a small scrap operation and too use a grinder and recip sawzall. I have been wanting to get an oxy/acetelyne setup for the benefit of being able to use a welding tip too. because i want to weld and it would be a low price setup in comparison to a plasma cutter, I would buy a Plasma if i could find the benefit of buying the plasma over an oxy setup for scrapping. and also thank you for coming on here respecfully an not trying to sell us anything or spam the forums.