About Rusty

About Rusty

Hi, I’m Rusty and welcome to Rusty’s Metal Cut Signs & Designs. I’m based just outside Mandurah in Western Australia, about an hour south of Perth.

Between October and May, you’ll find me at the Mandjar Markets on Mandurah’s eastern foreshore, every Sunday, so if you’re in the area, make sure you come along and say ‘hi’.

As the name suggests, we’re all about creating metal cut items out of aluminium or mild steel. These will be cut on our home built Computer Numeric Control (CNC) plasma cutting table.
Our motto is ‘if we can draw it, we can cut it’.

I bought my first plasma cutter a few years ago, because I wanted to cut some aluminium sheet and fabricate some items for my 4WD. This got me thinking about how to drive the torch around so I could cut out parts of various shapes, rather than doing it by hand.

After searching online for ‘cnc plasma cutting tables’ and not finding anything that I found economically viable. So I embarked on my ‘how hard can it be to build my own CNC plasma cutting table’ journey and the result is the CNC plasma cutting table you see in the photo.

If you would like to check out the plasma table build, be sure to take a look at my YouTube channel, Rusty’s Metal Cut Signs & Designs.

For the technically minded, it has a footprint of 1800 x 1800mm and a cutting area of 1300 x 1300mm. The drive system uses 1605 ballscrews attached to NEMA23 stepper motors. These are controlled by the MyPlasm CNC controller and plasma interface unit from Proma Elektronika.

Cut files are designed in Inkscape and the saved .dxf files are imported into the MyPlasm cutting software.

The plasma cutter is a Thermacut SD55 with a machine torch and it can cut metal up to 20mm thick…so far I’ve only cut up to 10mm mild steel.

Are you looking for something for your wall, garden or shed, or need something fabricated? If so, you can bring us a photo or a concept drawing and I’ll do my best to turn it into the piece of art or the fabricated item that you envisioned.