Totally cold cut. No heat affected zones. No distortion!
Cuts up to 3" thick in Stainless or Tool Steel.
Pierces from solid down to .040" diameter.
No burrs! No oil or grease. Environmentally proper.
Capabilities
Let us put our 20+ years of experience building tools, fixtures and
details for the aircraft industry to work for you.
Cut it Hard and Cold
Hardness or toughness of materials means
little to a water jet. We have cut hardened tools steels right
along with things like Inconel, Titanium, Hastalloy, Stellite and
others. That makes cutting aluminum and stainless a walk in the
park.
Nest for profit
Nesting of parts or blanks within expensive materials can provide big
savings to you, many times exceeding the cost of water jet
cutting. We only need .030" for a cut. That means we
can go through an area twice in any profile with .100" gap and
still have room to breath. We can mix and match finished and
roughed areas within a part. Our standard finish is better than a
125 RMS unidirectional callout and resembles a sandblasted surface.
Look at it two ways:
First, we all know how expensive the exotics
are. These are usually used in parts with interesting
configurations. Many of these can yield two or more pieces in the
same amount of material as you would need to make one blank. So if
you cut your cost of titanium in half on a job, how much is that?
Second, why spend all that time cutting away all
that tough material when you can start with a near net shape part that
only needs finished machined in certain areas? Save a few bucks in
time, tooling and grief.
This is an area that is often overlooked and has the potential to save
you a lot of time and money and provide us with a nice retirement.
Distortion?..we ain't got no stinkin' distortion.
One of the toughest jobs in any machine shop is trying to figure out
how to hold or clamp a frail or weird looking part in order to cut it,
and not bend it. It takes a lot of clamping force to overcome
cutting forces, but that has to be balanced against throwing so much
stress into a part during cutting that it moves when it comes out of the
holding device. Most of these forces are generated during the
roughing process. CNC Abrasive Water Jet Machining uses over
40,000 pounds of pressure, but it is applied to such a small area that
it only puts 1 pound of force on the part. Look at it as cold
liquid grinding. This also means that we only need to clamp with
about 2 pounds of force to be sure that things don't move. The
result of this is that parts come out to the print.
Tolerances of the cut
Positional accuracy of the machine is .002" over the entire
bed. Taper of the cut on a standard cut runs about .004" per
side per inch of depth. Put all this together and you can see that
we can run +.010" all day with statistical accuracy.
Tighter on smaller items.
