We just finished a big run of electrical cabinet panels for a controls integrator — 14-gauge and 11-gauge mild steel, with a mix of rectangular knockouts, mounting hole patterns, and some fairly complex cable entry cutouts. The kind of job that would take forever on a punch press but runs smoothly through a laser.
We cut these on our Trumpf TruLaser 3030 with the 4kW CO2 source. Nitrogen assist gas on the finer cutouts to keep the edges clean and oxide-free — the customer was painting these parts and didn’t want any extra cleanup. On the heavier 11-gauge, we switched to oxygen assist for better cut speed and it saved us meaningful time across the full run.
Total parts cut was just over 400 panels across three different part numbers. Nesting was done in our CAM software the night before, and the sheet utilization came out around 87%, which is solid for a mixed-size job like this. Parts went straight to the brake press for bending after cutting — no deburring needed on the laser edges, which is a real time-saver. This is the kind of high-mix, mid-volume work our laser is built for.