You likely know the saying: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." That's true for a lot of things in life, including your plasma cutting system. Fortunately, a small investment of time is often all it takes to keep your system in good shape. The key though is to do maintenance regularly.
Your routine should contain two components: (1) routine cleaning and inspection, and (2) replacement of common wear items. Your owner's manual will walk you through the recommended steps for your system, but here's the preventive maintenance program for our HyPerformance HPR or HPR XD systems.
In addition to the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks outlined above, you also need to focus on common wear items. Because plasma systems are precision machines with moving parts like torches, main contactors, relays, and such, these parts are going to wear out. The frequency of part replacement will vary depending on system usage, but typically you’ll want to replace items after a set number of months or arc hours. Recommendations (again for our HyPerformance HPR or HPR XD systems) are as follows:
