This is more exciting to me than any 3D plastic lump printer in my price range.
Can they deliver this?
Do want.
This is more exciting to me than any 3D plastic lump printer in my price range.
Can they deliver this?
Do want.
The impression that I get is that it's very limited by the psi and that I see no mention of abrasives. Good luck cutting anything very hard without the addition of something like Garnet.
I'm subscribed to their updates but am pretty skeptical.
In reply to Kreb:
Did you watch the video? He added Garnet at the beginning.
Look at the cutting speeds.
It's going to be slower than Forrest Gump.
Still pretty cool but not $5k cool. For me anyway.
It is a really cool tool to have on hand and the technology is pretty cool. Waterjets can do some impressive things but in many cases are still no substitute for a small mill or CNC. I would have some concerns on pressure size limitations for work that you could accomplish. There are a lot of jobs waterjets are good for but also many that they are not. The biggest issues I remember dealing with were having to constantly build and adapt jigs for part orientation and submersion in the waterbath. Issues with cutting stream deflection and depth were also issues.
In reply to Nick (Bo) Comstock:
Honestly I did not. I looked around their website and could not find a single mention of an abrasive, so I made an assumption. My bad. I have heard that the cutting rates are pretty slow due to low psi relative to industrial units, but if you're not doing production work, that shouldn't be an impediment.
Production units typically incur $20 to $40/hr in costs relative to consumables, clean-up and repair, but it's apples and oranges.
In reply to Kreb:
Yeah, in the video he cut an aluminium sprocket out of 1/4" plate. Took an hour and a half. That would have been maybe five minutes in our machine. But, for making a one off part as a hobbyist I think that's acceptable. It'll still be expensive to run.
Or about 30 seconds with a 4000 watt Laser or High definition CNC cutter!
I don't mean to badmouth the product. Anything that makes it easier to build stuff is AOK in my book. I'm just cautious. How long is an inexpensive 20,000 PSI pump going to last? That sort of thing.
6K$ is a crap ton of waterjet time with someone with the right machine. Plus 1.5 hours on there machine is about 10 minutes with my guy to cut there example. ~250$ a hour to run the waterjet for my guy cut 6 pieces at about 144$ pieces for payback on machine minus consumables.
But 216 hours to run that much work through there machine. On a system that costs less then 6K.
A DIY plasma cutter would seem to be a better tool, cheaper and faster, unless you want to cut rocks or something that the plasma cutter won't do.
It's been a while, but I think I paid like $220 or so to cut out an exhaust manifold flange set for a Lotus 910 motor from 1/2" 304, including the materials, on a big waterjet machine.
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