Talons Garage — Shop Updates: Skid Plate Fabrication

[Talon2006]

Trigger Warning: I talk about powder coating in this post

Packaging is the last thing the customer sees before they get the product, and it's a step that took us way longer to get right than I expected.


When we first started shipping, our biggest problem wasn't padding — it was finding boxes that actually fit. A skid plate is an awkward shape, and trying to pad one inside a box that's slightly too big is a losing battle. No matter how much filler you stuff in there, the plate finds a way to move.

We went through a handful of iterations trying to make off-the-shelf boxes work. Eventually we just bit the bullet and ordered custom boxes built for our plates. That was a game changer. Once the box actually fit the part, everything else got easier.

Since then we've cycled through a few packaging suppliers and upgraded to thicker, stronger boxes. The plates aren't light, and a box that was "good enough" for one order isn't always good enough after a carrier gets done with it.


Powder coating added a whole new challenge. The corners and edges are where damage shows up first, and once powder coat chips, there's no easy fix on the customer end. Pipe insulation ended up being the answer — slits cut down one side, slipped over the edges of the plate. Cheap, fast, and it actually works.

We're still tweaking the process. Every batch we ship teaches us something small, whether it's how to stack boxes more efficiently or which corners need extra protection. I don't think packaging is ever really "done".


What's the worst shipping damage you've seen show up at your door? I've heard some horror stories — curious what you've all received.

 

[Talon2006]

When I was a kid, I used to dream about being able to draw a part on a computer and make it out of raw material for my RC car. That seemed like the ultimate — if I could ever pull that off, I'd really have made it.

Later in life I discovered what a CNC plasma was and dug deep into it. There were actually people building their own. I had zero CAD skills and had never used a CNC machine before, but I figured I could probably do it. Then I found out about lasers. I went down that rabbit hole hard until I saw the price tag. There was no way I'd ever afford that.

Years later, here we are. The laser is the heart of our shop and every part starts here.

We're running an Oree 6kW fiber laser with an exchange table. For skid plate work, fiber laser made sense for a few reasons. The cuts are clean, the kerf is narrow (around 0.004" — much tighter than plasma), and the heat-affected zone at the cut edge is small enough that parts don't distort or change properties at the edge. For 3/16" steel and 1/4" aluminum, that combination is hard to beat.

The bigger reason we went 6kW specifically — back reflection. Aluminum is reflective, especially at thicker gauges, and when it reflects laser energy back up into the cutting head and source, lower-power lasers can take real damage. A 6kW handles the back reflection from 1/4" aluminum a lot better than a 3kW or 4kW would. It's a topic worth its own post down the road.

We didn't go bigger than 6kW because there was no point. 6kW already gives us all the room to grow we need for what we're cutting. A bigger laser would just cost more money without giving us any real benefit on this material — faster cuts on parts we already cut fast enough.

Speaking of fast — the laser is dramatically quicker than plasma was. Cleaner cuts and tighter holes are the headline, but the speed difference alone changed what we could get done in a day.

The Oree itself runs a Raytools cutting head, MAX Photonics laser source, and Cypcut control. Bed is 3015×1530mm, which fits a full 5x10 sheet. Positioning accuracy spec'd at ±0.03mm/m, which is plenty for our work.

What "good cut quality" actually means in production: the part comes off the sheet with a consistent edge from corner to corner, holes that hit dimension, and minimal burr on the back side. When the machine is dialed in, you can run a full sheet and every part looks the same.

When it isn't dialed in — that's a different post.

Anyone running a fiber laser at home or in a shop? Curious what brand and power you went with — there's a lot more options now than there were a few years ago.

 

[Talon2006]

The same fiber laser that cuts steel also cuts aluminum, but the two materials behave very differently when the beam hits them. Both have their quirks, and figuring out where each one wants to be dialed in is part of running production.

Steel is the more forgiving of the two. The cut is generally cleaner with less attention, the parameters are more tolerant, and the parts come off the bed looking pretty consistent shot to shot. When something's slightly off — gas pressure, focus, speed — steel tends to keep cutting reasonably well. It gives you room to figure out what's wrong before quality really suffers.

Aluminum is the finicky one. It's more reflective, conducts heat away from the cut faster, and is generally less tolerant of small errors. When parameters drift, aluminum tells you about it quickly — burr on the back, rough edges, the cut starts to look ugly. Especially at thicker gauges, aluminum demands more attention and more dialing in to keep results consistent.

Visually you can see the difference too — steel throws a lot more smoke and sparks during the cut, while aluminum runs cleaner-looking but less forgiving.

For assist gas, we run high-pressure compressed air on basically everything. It's a setup that doesn't get talked about online as much as nitrogen, but that's mostly because it's newer — the specialty compressors that can deliver the pressure and dryness a laser needs weren't common when most of the laser content out there was being written. Nitrogen is still the right answer for stainless, medical parts, food-grade, some aerospace work — anywhere you need a perfectly oxidation-free edge for spec or coating reasons. For general fab work like ours, high-pressure air gives us the cut quality we need without the hassle and ongoing cost of running nitrogen tanks. We've run pure oxygen a few times on really thick material when we needed the extra heat to make the cut, but that's the exception.

There are also powder coating benefits to running air on parts that get coated. That's a topic worth its own post down the road.

We were running air from day one. We skipped the nitrogen step entirely, which meant figuring out the compressor side ourselves before there was much of a market for laser-specific air systems. It's gotten a lot more accessible since then — more guys are running air now, and the compressor side of the market has caught up.

The biggest tradeoff between materials isn't really the cut quality — it's the attention. Steel runs itself once the parameters are dialed. Aluminum keeps you watching.

We dive deeper into specific aluminum challenges in a future post.
Raw aluminum cut edge vs steel cut edge

Steel can be a lot more smokey compared to aluminun.

If you've cut both steel and aluminum in your shop or garage, which one fights you more? Curious if the experience matches what we see in production.

 

[Talon2006]

Bolt holes don't seem like the part of a skid plate that matters most, but they actually decide whether the plate goes on smoothly or fights you the whole install.

Hole accuracy is something laser cutting just does well. A fiber laser holds tolerances around ±0.003" on hole diameter. For comparison, plasma's spec is around ±0.020" — and honestly, that's an optimistic number. In real-world conditions, plasma often runs worse than spec. Even drilled holes without precision tooling are usually ±0.005" or worse. Laser is in a different league for this kind of work.

Why it matters in practice — a skid plate has multiple bolt holes, often in different orientations across the part. If even one hole is off by 0.020", you can end up with a plate that hangs on one bolt but won't accept the next. Multiply that across a stack of mounting points and the install turns into a fight. Worse, if the installer has to elongate or redrill a hole to make it fit, the alignment is now compromised and the plate isn't sitting where it was designed to.

Maintaining that accuracy across a full sheet isn't just about the machine — heat builds up as you cut, and parts can shift or distort if the cut order is bad. Most of that gets handled by the nesting software, which sequences cuts to spread heat across the sheet instead of concentrating it in one area. That's part of why nesting and cut planning matters more than people realize.

The result the customer sees is simple: bolts drop in, plate sits flat, install takes 20 minutes instead of an hour with frustration in the middle.

Hole alignment on aftermarket armor is one of those things you don't notice when it's right and curse when it's wrong. Anyone else picky about install fitment, or am I alone here?

Anyone ever installed a skid plate or armor where the holes just wouldn't line up? What did you do — drill it out, send it back, or fight through it?

 

[AZsurveyor]

Appreciate the stroy telling. Little is always known about the time and effort it takes to create a product, now talk about a great product.

This speak highly of your build(s) and goes a long way.

Still waiting on the group buy.

 

[Talon2006]

Cutting holes at the laser instead of drilling them later is one of those decisions that doesn't seem like a big deal until you've done it both ways. We've done it both ways. Laser wins, and not by a small margin.

Before we had the laser, we ran most parts on plasma. Plasma is a good tool for general cutting, but it has real limits on small holes. The smaller a hole gets, the harder plasma struggles to keep it round and clean. In our experience, plasma was reliable on holes around 2x material thickness or larger — so on 1/4" aluminum, that's about a 1/2" hole minimum. Smaller than that and you start fighting lead-ins, lead-outs, out-of-round cuts, and just generally ugly results.

That ruled out a lot of holes for us. Oil drain doors and their rivnut mounts use M5 bolts, which need a small hole that plasma simply couldn't cut cleanly. Our workaround at the time was to pierce the location at the plasma table, then drill the holes later — sometimes on a drill press, sometimes by hand on parts too big to fit the press. It worked, but it was a lot of extra steps and a lot of room for error.

The laser changed all of that. In our experience, fiber laser handles holes down to about 1x material thickness reliably — and our setup does better than that. We run 0.16" holes in 1/4" aluminum as a production part, hole after hole, clean and consistent. Haven't pushed it to 1/8" yet but I'd be surprised if it didn't handle that too. Either way, no drilling station, no second handling step.

Cutting holes at the laser eliminates the drilling step, eliminates the handling between operations, and produces a more consistent part. For us, it's not even a close call.

Anyone building their own armor or skid plates — what's your hole method? Plasma + drill, laser, plasma + punch, something else?

 

[Talon2006]

Nesting is one of those parts of laser cutting that doesn't sound exciting but completely changes how efficiently a shop runs. It's the layout of parts on a sheet — how many you fit, how close together they sit, and what gets sacrificed to scrap.

When we were on plasma, we ran one product per sheet. We had pre-nested layouts saved for each part, and that was the operation — pull up the layout, run the sheet, repeat. It worked, but it left a lot of material on the floor when an order didn't perfectly match a sheet's worth of parts.

The laser came with much better nesting software, and that completely changed the game. Now we can pack multiple part types onto a single sheet — different skid plates, brackets, smaller pieces — all running off the same starting material. The software handles most of it automatically, packing parts in based on the order queue. We tweak when something looks off, but the auto-nest gets us 90% of the way there.

Material cost adds up over time. We don't track scrap rate down to the percentage, but you can feel the difference between a well-nested sheet and a wasteful one. The laser pays you back on material every single time you run a tightly-packed sheet versus a half-empty one.

There's a real tradeoff between tight nesting and cut quality though. If parts are nested too closely, a small problem becomes a big one. A part doesn't have to fully tip up to cause issues — if it's too close to its neighbor and slightly raises during cutting, it can lift the cutting head as it passes over. That tiny height change throws off the laser focus, and suddenly the next part on the sheet has bad cuts. We've learned where the right balance is — close enough to maximize material, far enough that one slightly stubborn part doesn't ruin the rest of the sheet.

Good nesting isn't just about saving material. It's about getting through a sheet cleanly, every time.

Anyone been on the receiving end of a fab job that you could tell was nested poorly? Or had a part show up with marks from another part being cut next to it?

 

[Talon2006]

Lessons Learned: Parts Tipping Up During Cutting (aka "Cutting head crash")

So about a year ago I learned a very expensive lesson about how fast things can go wrong on a fiber laser.

We were running a batch of skid plates. The laser was currently cutting an oil door out of one of those plates. That door cutout was held in the sheet by just a single tab.

The laser finished that cut and lifted up to rapid to the next part at 1500 inches per minute. At the same time, the high-pressure assist air and the head lifting up knocked that oil door piece up right in front of the laser's path.

The laser head ran straight into it.

Destroyed the head. Moved the entire sheet several inches. Scrapped the rest of that batch.

The threaded ring on the nose of the laser, the one that holds the ceramic ring on, got damaged in the impact. Stripped the threads. Now I can't get it apart to replace the consumable parts.

The cutting head itself costs six thousand dollars. I didn't have a spare, so I bought a new one. Then I sent the broken head to the manufacturer to get it rebuilt, twenty-five hundred dollars. Total damage: eighty-five hundred dollars plus a week of downtime while the replacement arrived.

All because one tab wasn't enough to hold that piece down against the air pressure and the head movement. A fifty-cent piece of hardware took out a six-thousand-dollar cutting head.

Here I am pointing at the 50 cents worth of steel that destroyed my entire first head.

The cutting nozzle and ceramic ring that I could no longer replace with the threaded ring stripped.

Lessons learned:

More tabs per part. The extra cut time is nothing compared to the cost of a cutting head. And honestly, more tabs make the whole process more reliable.

Found out later I could've replaced just the threaded ring for a fraction of the rebuild cost. Now I have a local source for it, so if this happens again, it's a quick fix instead of a complete rebuild.

The big one though, operator fatigue on a machine moving at 1500 inches per minute is real. When you're paying attention to a boring, repetitive process, you get distracted. You stop watching. Then something goes wrong and you can't even react in time to stop it. We'll dig into that more next week.

Anyone else had something go wrong fast and not been able to stop it, machine, vehicle, whatever? What happened?

 

[Talon2006]

Last week I told you how a single tab let a part pop up and cost me an $8,500 cutting head. This week: what a tab actually is, and how we tab now so that doesn't happen again.

When we cut parts out of a sheet, we don't cut them all the way free. We leave tiny uncut spots — tabs, or microjoints — that hold the part to the sheet until we pull it out by hand. Without them, small parts tip up, drop through the slats, or get shoved around by the assist gas mid-cut. A tipped part is what catches the cutting head.

And it doesn't even have to hit the head to cost you. A part that flips up can shove the whole sheet out of position. Once the sheet moves, the machine has lost its reference — every hole and bolt pattern cut after that is off. We catch it before it ever goes anywhere, but "catching it" means the whole sheet is scrap. Quiet, expensive, and nobody outside the shop ever sees it.

And tip-ups aren't the only reason to tab. On long parts, tabs hold the piece square while it's being cut. As the laser puts heat into the sheet, the part wants to move — we're talking thousandths of an inch, but on a long part that's enough to throw off a hole location or leave you fighting the fit later. Tabs anchor it so it comes out of the sheet the same shape it was drawn.

How small is a tab? Each one is about as wide as a credit card is thick. That's all that's holding the part in place. Sounds like nothing — and nothing is exactly the problem when you don't run enough of them.

That's the change we made. It's not that our tabs got bigger. We just quit being stingy with how many we run. Parts that used to get one tab now get as many as they need to stay flat and stay put, and we eat the slower cycle time.

Take our oil doors. They get four tabs to keep them from popping up. But because we cut the door inside its own opening, that works out to eight microtabs in the program. Counting the first pierce, that's nine separate times the machine has to stop, move over, re-pierce, and start the cut again — on one small part. That's slower, no way around it.

None of this is a fixed formula, though. A big part can need fewer tabs than you'd think — it's heavy enough and spans enough slats to sit still on its own. A small part can need more than seems reasonable, because there's nothing else holding it down. And a complex shape with a lot of perimeter often needs none at all — it's got enough contour and contact to stay put, and if you tabbed every feature you'd never get the part broken out clean. How many tabs, and where they go, is mostly just experience. There's no substitute for having watched a few thousand parts come off the table.

Here's the part people get wrong, though: the tradeoff isn't breakout. More tabs doesn't mean you're fighting to snap parts loose — ours still come out with about the same effort. The cost is machine time, not labor. And machine time is cheap next to a scrapped sheet or a wrecked head.

The other thing more tabs buys you is room to breathe. When the process is forgiving, a boring repetitive run doesn't have to be white-knuckle. You're not standing there praying nothing tips at 1500 inches a minute — the tabs cover the moment your attention slips. And on a long run, it always slips.

This isn't just us being paranoid, either. The Fabricator ran a whole piece on it — high-pressure assist gas is strong enough to flip a loose part right up onto the sheet mid-cut. One tab isn't holding against that. We learned it the expensive way so you don't have to.

Anybody else learn a lesson like this the hard way — a part that moved when it shouldn't have and wrecked a cut, a tool, or a whole batch? What happened?

 

[Talon2006]

Quarter-inch aluminum is the finickiest material we run on the laser. Steel is forgiving — it cuts clean across a wide range of settings and mostly does what you tell it. Aluminum is not that. It fights you the whole way.

A few things make it a pain, and they're all physics.

First, the reflection problem — and it's not what most people picture. The danger isn't the beam glancing off the surface. It's the molten pool. As aluminum melts, that liquid puddle turns into a mirror, and if it reflects the beam straight back down the fiber into the source, you can lose the source. Not a "wears out over time" thing — a one-time, blow-up-the-laser thing.

That's why a strong pierce matters so much on aluminum. You punch through the material fast, before the molten puddle sits there long enough to set up that mirror and send it all back at you. Pierce weak or hang in one spot too long and you're rolling the dice on your source.

It's also why power matters more than people think. A laser that'll cut quarter-inch steel all day can be risky on quarter-inch aluminum — same thickness, completely different story. Aluminum reflects so much energy that it demands more power to cut than steel does, and without enough power to punch through cleanly, quarter-inch aluminum is right where sources get killed.

Second, aluminum is sticky. It pulls heat away fast — way faster than steel — so the sheet acts like a giant heat sink and the molten metal cools before the assist gas can clear it. It wants to cling to the kerf and weld the part right back to the skeleton. That's your dross.

And there's a second layer to that, literally. The instant aluminum hits air it grows a microscopic skin of aluminum oxide, and that skin behaves nothing like the metal underneath it. The aluminum melts around 1,200°F. The oxide skin doesn't melt until nearly 3,800°F — more than three times hotter. So even as the metal under it goes liquid, that stubborn high-temp shell stays put, clinging and clogging the kerf. Anybody who's TIG welded aluminum has fought this exact layer — it's the same oxide you have to break through there. The window where everything works is narrow, and it doesn't take much to fall out of it.

Even the smoke is different. Cutting steel throws thick black smoke that clouds up the whole enclosure — you can watch it hang in there. Aluminum looks cleaner, just a light white haze. Don't let that fool you, though: those fine white particles are the ones that drift up into the nozzle and settle on the protective lens. A fouled lens scatters the beam and kills your cut quality, so aluminum keeps you on top of lens cleaning in a way steel never does.

Here's where we went our own way. A lot of guidance says cut aluminum with pure nitrogen. We run air — that little bit of oxygen in shop air actually helps aluminum cut for our setup. When we got our laser, cutting aluminum on air was still pretty new; a lot of shops weren't doing it yet. We figured it out by trial and error, no vendor cheat sheet. We even started with too small a compressor and had to upgrade later — but that's a story for another post.

When aluminum goes wrong, it goes wrong in a few ways. Best case, rough edge and extra dross to clean up. Worst case, it doesn't cut all the way through — half-cut sheet, mess in the machine, scrapped batch.

So why bother? Because customers love aluminum skid plates, and for good reason — real protection without the weight of steel. It takes more attention to run, but the parts are worth it. It's finicky, not impossible. You just have to respect what it is.


Anyone else work both steel and aluminum? Beyond the laser — welding, bending, machining, whatever — where's aluminum easier than steel, and where's it the bigger pain?

 

[Talon2006]

Every problem we've talked about — tabbing, tip-ups, finicky aluminum — shows up in one place: the edge. The edge is the report card for the whole cut.

Good edge, bad edge — for us it comes down to smooth versus rough. A clean cut comes off smooth and square. A bad one comes off rough, and you can see it instantly.

We're not chasing a pretty edge for its own sake, though. What we actually care about is two things: how well powder coat grabs it, and how clean the underside of the plate is — because that underside is the side that takes the hits and lives in the mud.

The single biggest thing that quietly wrecks an edge in our shop is a dirty lens. Remember that fine white aluminum haze from last week, the stuff that drifts up and fouls the protective lens? A fouled lens scatters the beam, and a scattered beam gives you a rough, junk edge. Half of "edge quality" is just keeping the optics clean.

Then there's the assist gas — and for a coated part, this is the one that matters most. For us it comes down to oxygen versus air.

Cut steel with oxygen and you get a clean bottom edge, basically zero dross. Sounds ideal. But oxygen burns as it cuts and leaves a hard oxide scale on the edge — that blue-gray heat scale. That scale is the trap. Powder sticks to it fine on day one, but the scale itself isn't bonded to the steel. First time that edge meets a rock or sits in wet mud, the scale lets go and your coating peels off with it. And getting that scale off before coating is a real job — grinding, blasting, or acid.

So we cut our steel on air. Air throws more dross and the bottom comes off rougher — but dross sands right off, and we've got a sander set up for exactly that. Knocking dross off is a whole lot easier than fighting oxygen's oxide scale. Better yet, the light oxidation air leaves actually gives the powder something to bite into. It sticks better, not worse.

That matters more than it sounds, because powder is already weakest at the edges — the coating pulls thin over any sharp corner no matter what you do. The last thing you want under it is a bad substrate. Start with an edge that grips and you're not fighting the coating and the metal at the same time.

Steel and aluminum come off looking different, each with its own tells. But when the cut's dialed in, both are easy to deal with downstream. When it's off, you're standing at the sander wondering what you got wrong upstream.

Can you tell where the bad one is in the stack? Minor error, but can lead to bigger problems.



If you've had powder or paint peel off an edge — skid, bumper, bracket, whatever — it usually starts where the metal was cut. Where did yours let go?

 

[Optimus🤖]

Every problem we've talked about — tabbing, tip-ups, finicky aluminum — shows up in one place: the edge. The edge is the report card for the whole cut.

Good edge, bad edge — for us it comes down to smooth versus rough. A clean cut comes off smooth and square. A bad one comes off rough, and you can see it instantly.

We're not chasing a pretty edge for its own sake, though. What we actually care about is two things: how well powder coat grabs it, and how clean the underside of the plate is — because that underside is the side that takes the hits and lives in the mud.

The single biggest thing that quietly wrecks an edge in our shop is a dirty lens. Remember that fine white aluminum haze from last week, the stuff that drifts up and fouls the protective lens? A fouled lens scatters the beam, and a scattered beam gives you a rough, junk edge. Half of "edge quality" is just keeping the optics clean.

Then there's the assist gas — and for a coated part, this is the one that matters most. For us it comes down to oxygen versus air.

Cut steel with oxygen and you get a clean bottom edge, basically zero dross. Sounds ideal. But oxygen burns as it cuts and leaves a hard oxide scale on the edge — that blue-gray heat scale. That scale is the trap. Powder sticks to it fine on day one, but the scale itself isn't bonded to the steel. First time that edge meets a rock or sits in wet mud, the scale lets go and your coating peels off with it. And getting that scale off before coating is a real job — grinding, blasting, or acid.

So we cut our steel on air. Air throws more dross and the bottom comes off rougher — but dross sands right off, and we've got a sander set up for exactly that. Knocking dross off is a whole lot easier than fighting oxygen's oxide scale. Better yet, the light oxidation air leaves actually gives the powder something to bite into. It sticks better, not worse.

That matters more than it sounds, because powder is already weakest at the edges — the coating pulls thin over any sharp corner no matter what you do. The last thing you want under it is a bad substrate. Start with an edge that grips and you're not fighting the coating and the metal at the same time.

Steel and aluminum come off looking different, each with its own tells. But when the cut's dialed in, both are easy to deal with downstream. When it's off, you're standing at the sander wondering what you got wrong upstream.

Can you tell where the bad one is in the stack? Minor error, but can lead to bigger problems.



If you've had powder or paint peel off an edge — skid, bumper, bracket, whatever — it usually starts where the metal was cut. Where did yours let go?

You can spot it clearly when looking at the cut faces and lower edges in both photos.

Counting up from the bottom of the stack resting on the red lift cart, it’s the fourth plate up.

 

[Talon2006]

You can spot it clearly when looking at the cut faces and lower edges in both photos.

Counting up from the bottom of the stack resting on the red lift cart, it’s the fourth plate up.

The real question is, is that enough to scrap a plate, or ship it?