Advance Cutting Systems plasma tables

A buddy, HVAC guy, is looking into cutting his own duct and went out for quotes on a commercial grade table.

He got a quote back for one of these with a Pmax45 and it's $50k. Cutter II 510 – Advance Cutting Systems!

I was looking over the sales brochure and while the mechanics/fab seem nice, there isn't much info on the electronics/controls end.

Does anyone have experience with this brand or these machines?

"AKS" has been around a long time. But I see these people (in the linky) are different.

FWIW, HVAC plasma tables are usually different, Jim Colt wrote about them in the archives somewhere.
Plasma Automation is a big player in the HVAC only plasma tables.
Vicon

However, I had a friend buy one used, and try to use it for general purpose cutting (1/4" plate brackets, etc.)
And found the company would not support him, and the machine was not suited for anything other than HVAC.

Haven't worked with that particular table, but I've used comparable tables (arclight, torchmate, plasmacam, etc) and will say ask what the lifting force is of the floating head. "Floating heads" are the bees knees of plasma tables, but are still complete junk compared to the height measuring systems of literally any other machine tool.

Anyway, some tables push the torch down way harder than needed to sense, and it forces thin metal to bow down, giving it bad height data and wearing your consumables due to zero height pierce.

For thin stuff acceleration is critical. You want to cut fast, but then it has to slow into corners, so you get low speed dross that has to be removed. The better the acceleration the higher the cutting speed you can sustain and the less dross is formed.

A hypertherm powermax with finecut consumables works great on thin metal, galvanized or not. Just be sure not to use the finecut swirl ring, as those are only meant for handheld use.

Plasma is smokey, so unless it is a water table (and even if it is) factor in fume collection to the price.

I've never used DuctCAM personally. You should ask them what software is used for the CNC controls side. The few controls I've used were all good except there was never a physical stop button, and pausing doesn't shut off the torch. I never understood why that was such a difficult thing to configure.