90blackcrx

Really good information

SLMachine

That'll be a nice upgrade! Those machines are mfg'd up my way, we've machined some prototype component pieces for them. You going to be able to chamfers w/ yours or just standard axis?

CRMB

No tilt. It's got a powered z for height sensing, but straight shot only. It's a multi-head cutter - 5 head capable machine, so it's mainly designed for pumping out flat patterns at acceptable speeds. With our other machine, it's like watching grass grow it's so slow.

SLMachine

Haha, kinda like machining stainless, cut feed speeds in half.....

How think are you cutting, and how many ipm do you plan to be able to cut @ w/ the new machine? I've had an interest in waterjets for a long time they're just damn expensive. I'd see cutting custom granite countertops and such as being a lucritive market.

CRMB

It depends on the material thickness, orifice/nozzle combo, pump pressure, abrasive rate, pump hp, machinability index, and cut quality.

Typically bigger pumps give you more gallons per minute. You match your orifice/nozzle combination to the gpm output of your pump. The larger the combo, the more garnet you can run and up to a point the faster you can cut.

3/8" 304 @ 60k psi, with a 0.013/0.030 combo, 0.8lb/min can be cut @ 7.7 inches per minute with very little striations. You can run it at 18 inches per minute for just sever cut and then finish machine the edges. My little flow @ 40k psi cuts at roughly half that feed rate using the same abrasive flow rate.

A 2" 304 job I just bid cut at 0.82 inch/minute. At sever cut, it was 2.6 inches per minute.

SLMachine

Hmm, i was expecting a lot faster cut speed then that.

CRMB

Process Comparison for 3/8" stainless from my data for similiar cut quality - although I've been told that 30 was really pushing cut quality on the trumpf.

Laser - 30 ipm (based on a Trumpf L3030 3000 watt machine).
Waterjet - 8-12 ipm (60k psi required).
Hydef Plasma - 80-100ipm (hypertherm hpr technology).

Goes to show how a mixed mode plasma/waterjet combo could give you the best of both worlds.

TannerS14

God you guys make me ****ing jealous. Id love to earn tools like this one day. Every time there's threads about tooling on here i gobble the **** up. Its one of the most important elements of fabrication work and not an easy thing to find concise information on. Great thread.

SLMachine

Very interesting comparisons. There is roughlty 3 dozen lasers w/in a 15 miles radius around my area but not a single waterjet to my knowledge. Was told because the lasers are faster and majority dont cut the thickness to justify the need for waterjet. I wasnt expecting the speed difference to be that much but i guess now it all makes sense.

Couple shops here have 6000 watt trumpfs and 6000 watt Mitsus. Suprised you haven't picked up a tube laser for collectors yet, or is that next?

When we had our plasma setup the tech basically said in his opinion high def wasnt as cracked up as it seemed and said a properly setup plasma would do damn near as well. Just the majority never spent the time to perfectly fine tune them.

CRMB

I have no experience with regular plasma on a cnc table. I know that going from the Komatsu high-def power source to the Hypertherm hydef, moved my cut rate from 30->80 inch's per minute with superior edge quality but with dramatically higher gas usage ($15 in gas an hour for ss/alum, less on mild). The holes regardless of the technology involved were never very good if they were near the thickness of the plate (3/8" or less hole on 3/8" plate = fail or say 3/4" hole on 3/4" plate = yuck).

One other thing I've noticed - I can get about 15-20% more parts on a comperable plate from waterjet (or laser in that case) just due to the size and shape of the lead in's required, and the kerf thickness. Lead in length average for plasma was about 1/2" or larger on thick material. Anything closer and the pierce slag would contaminate an edge of the part and the cut quality would suffer as the plasma passed over that slag. With a WJ, I can get away with a 0.050 length lead in/out combo.

As for tube laser processing. I dont have any plans for it. I've seen my laser cutter's power/gas bill a month, and it's insane. I would guess operating costs close to $300-$400+ an 8 hour day per machine (3000W size, I would think anything larger would be much more). It's a really scare thing when you look at total cost of ownership over 5 year length on a 1/2 million dollar machine (or more) and then chart shows "initial purchase" as 10% of the 100% murderous pie.

SLMachine

Yeah, my buddy runs the Mitsu tube laser and i wanna say they invested somewhere around $1.2 million into that machine. The charge a bill out rate of $850/hr. Over there they have 2 tube lasers, and 6 flat laser, 2 of them with pallet changers. Its just crazy to walk threw the place seeing 10's of millions of dollars in equipment and get a reality check of how small you really are. The auto industry would never support this type of equipment, but it sure would be nice.

CRMB

One of our major tube suppliers bought a big million dollar trumpf tube laser in 2008. From what I've heard, it isnt used much as it's really hard to find work for the machine because of the $$$ you have to charge to run it. When you look at the economics of it, you can get into a plasma tube processor for a fraction of that (less then 200K) and do every bit of the same structural & ornamental tube processing they do with the lasers if not more because you can do heavy wall pipe beveling & coping that most of the lasers dont have the ***** to do.

SLMachine

They do a lot work for John Deere and i believe are cutting frame rails and such. I know they also do some structural bridge frame stuff w/ it as well. The new larger one i believe can cut up to 8" diameter, 20' lengths and hold i believe 24 of those bars in a pallet loader.

John Deere, Case, CAT, and Bobcat pretty much keep the industrial manufacturing shops up here pretty busy. Pretty much all these guys w/ this equipment have their foot in the door w/ @ least one of those 4.

CRMB

One of the most annoying things about waterjets is so many of them come stock with these tiny little hoppers (unless you bent over when you bought the machine), that barely hold maybe 80lbs of abrasive.. meaning you gotta stop it and fill it every couple hours. If you don't, you end up blasting abrasive everywhere and screwing up your cut. We researched large hopper options, but most companies wanted $5-8k for 500lb hopper. So we built our own, out of a $100 air tank off craigslist and some fittings.

Pathetic 80lb stock hopper:



$200 hopper we built from used air tank, and 3 pressure-proof viewing windows from grainger. We just cut off the top, flipped it, welded it back on, welded up a few (big -1 huge) holes, added a few fittings and wa-la. ~800lb capacity hopper. Thing even holds pressure - what do you know.



Some pics of the machines: 1st waterjet - Mighty Midget (Flow Bengal)



Nested stainless parts.







Our second waterjet, a chukar/jet-edge machine, being put up - what a bitch squaring this thing up. It get's epoxied down into place, then concrete goes under the base plates for leveling.



Pump alone is about the size of the baby bengal.

Same model machine from Jet Edge website. Should like the same when completed.