Initial Symptoms

I was asked what was wrong with my plasma cutter before I started fixing it. Pretty much everything worked correctly. The power LED turned on, the fan started, air blew through the torch when the trigger was pressed. The only problem was that there was never an arc nor any cutting.

If you have a plasma cutter that isn't working, chances are there is a burned out component(s) inside. Just open it up, discharge the power as I describe in an earlier post, and look for broken components. Some of the most common ones are: leaking capacitor (oozing out the top), blown diode, burned up resistor, broken chip/mosfet (chunk missing from chip), broken relay.