I see the biggest complication being the selection of a direction - more than how to accomplish this.
It seems like there are quite a few ways to nail this for far less than $10,000.
I do like the idea of raising the pipe to meet the drill.
As far as the melting - that's simply tooling configuration combined with speed/feed. Easily solved with some level of speed control/definition.
Do you have a general layout in mind yet?
Scott
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