He doesn't pierce because the sand would spray in his face if he did. What kind of control software and gantry is recommended to a hobbyist wanting to do this?
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He doesn't pierce because the sand would spray in his face if he did. What kind of control software and gantry is recommended to a hobbyist wanting to do this?
The WAZER doesn't seem economical at all. If you look at their feed rate, it can cut (max) .1875" mild steel at .4 ipm. It consumes .33lb of garnet per minute at ~$1.1 per pound.
Imagine a simple part, say a single .1875 3 x 5" bracket with a few features, call it 35 inches of cutting. With piercing I image the cut time will be around 90 minutes. 33 dollars worth of garnet for a simple part. A 60k psi water jet could cut the part nearly two orders of magnitude faster. The same part is probably 2 minutes on a 100/hr. industrial machine. Just doesn't add up.
I'm sure there will be some niche use cases, but it seems mostly like a bad deal.
I'll trust your math, but for hobby, the math looks attractive. Imagine that same simple part. It takes 2 weeks to get the first prototype cut and shipped to me from a machine shop. The part has a mistake, now the second one takes another 2 weeks. Then there is a design change, the 3rd one takes another 2 weeks. That's 6 weeks to do the same thing Wazer can do in one day. So I would argue that for a hobbyist, there is more value in a Wazer-like machine than a machine shop.
Recycling garnet is possible. Much of it never hits the material.
Good luck drying it out and separating it from the tiny material "chips". And the garnet that does hit the material has the sharp corners worn.
For 20-25 cents a pound I'm using fresh garnet.
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Too rich for me. I'll stick to using my CNC mill for metals. What would be really interesting would be if a water jet like this could use table salt as the medium or some other graded sand to be "cheap", just for cutting wood, and then mount the head in place of router on a Maslow CNC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60q6U7NjTQ&t=5s
Where's all the water gonna go?
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Through the wood and into the clouds..
I measured the output pressure of the Wazer. It is about 3850 PSI. There are pressure washers that have higher output, but perhaps not electric ones which is kind of an important part of the convenience factor of this product. I measured abrasive flow at 0.27 lbs/min. Not too economical given the cutting speeds. Looking at the amount of particle destruction I found that about 85% of the used abrasive has particle sizes roughly equivalent to new abrasive. If cutting metal or stone I wouldn't worry too much about those particles from the kerf causing issues with cutting performance. (If you were worried about that, this isn't the product for you anyway, IMO.)
As far as used abrasive having rounded off corners...assuming that is even a real thing (and there may be some particles that come out sharper than they were originally if they were shattered during use) I doubt you'd see an effect at these pressures. It might vary slightly depending on the material being cut as well. But I've never tried to quantify that effect.
You could probably just put the used abrasive into some pans or something and let it dry out especially if you're a hobbyist and aren't planning to go into production with this thing.
I suspect the consumable wear must be pretty minimal at these pressures so that's a plus.
Hey, I bought recently a superpower washer, that can wife everything in his way, it will not let you a chance to the dirt to stay on any surface. I knew that buying a power washer from a company and it was a really good idea. Even my wife's mother(she hates me) said that it is a good acquisition for our family, and she can't believe that I had such an idea and at first she thought that her daughter had such an idea.
Omax Now have a personal waterjet called the Protomax they are super accurate, with bed size of 12"x12" and can cut up to 1"