How Does a Waterjet Work? Waterjet 101

welcome back to the shop everyone today we're going to be doing a Question and Answer about the flow Mach 500 water jet that you see behind me [Music] I'm gonna be answering all your questions from how did this big gigantic thing get into the shop what kind of life support does it take to operate it how do you operate it what kind of material does it cut how thick will the cut how fast does it cut and then just basically its overall operations will take apart and we'll throw it in here and we'll actually cut it from start to finish so stay tuned for that so to answer the first question is what is a water jet this thing is actually pretty complicated but in simplified terms we can take tap water we can boost it through a pump the water comes out of this nozzle at plus the speed of sound we mix in some abrasive with that water that's exiting the nozzle put material underneath that water cutter and we can cut stuff with it we have CNC control of the machine so we can position that jet anywhere we want so that's basically it we can cut a vast array of materials with water so that leads me into the next question as you can see this machine is huge how did I get into this building and we'll walk through that question now the machine showed up on a huge semi-truck each component was boxed individually in multiple wood boxes we had two halves of the tank the two supports for the gantry they get bolted to the floor the flow garnet hopper and the ninety four thousand psi intensifier pump the tank is approximately 20 feet long and ten feet wide with a cutting capacity of eight feet by 12 feet there was nothing special that needed to be done to the floor as long as the floor of a somewhat level it's sitting on three and a half inches of concrete but the machine itself the moving components are isolated from the water tank it took about two to three days to install the machine we just bolted the two tanks together with this cool gasket they smashed this piece of hard rubber it almost feels like a glue stick and it's one big huge long piece that drapes and goes in between the two parts and then they get bolted together and this I don't know what you call this thing piece of rubber some fancy rubber gets smashed into like a pancake and then put a piece of half inch flat bar so that the water jet doesn't cut it and yes this machine will cut the floor of this tank if it's held in one spot too long through the water and in some cases I've heard that a customer that owns these things will put a our plate down on the floor one of the questions I get all the time is how much water does this thing use it is a water jet right but it actually doesn't really use that much it just uses the water line from the building which is about this is about 15 gallons a minute but it really only takes about five gallons a minute to support this machine but the first place that the water comes from the building is to this water filter over here you don't really need filtered water if you got clean but it just helps keep the components a little bit cleaner and then from the water filter enters the intensifier pump this is where all the magic happens this was makes this cool is the ninety four thousand psi intensifier pump and how this thing works is a 50 horsepower electric motor that's run off of a hundred amps from the building the hydraulic pump pressurizes the Pistons inside here and this piston moves back and forth and at the ends of those Pistons is its neck down to a smaller rod so we're gaining some mechanical advantage and that is now compressing the water sending the water out the lines and into this accumulator and the cute accumulators job is to take the the the pulses out of the strokes from the intensifier and just basically give the cutting nozzle clear pulse free 94 thousand psi water once you get to about four five hundred hours it takes about an hour and a half and you can rebuild the pump right here in the shop and it's pretty cheap to actually build these things I just got back from a class to learn how to do it myself so I'm excited to be able to maintain the pump myself right here in the shop let's take a look inside at the hydraulics so this is pretty cool there's our big 50 horsepower motor things awesome and then our hydraulic pump so what we have also is with the water coming in from the filtered going through a coolant system and the coolant is just keeping the pump cool the intensifier pump does not recycle tank water it's always seeing clear clean water so out of the accumulator the water is now pressurized and it's hops into this hard lines and this is all this is it this is where the water goes it follows the hard lines up and into this what we call the whip stand this flexible flagpole and it follows the gantry when the gantry is moving it gives that flexibility so this hard line doesn't get a kink in it the water enters the movable head of the gantry or there's what we call the z-axis and there's still hard lined into this is a five axis X D cutting head which this is it's going to be able to rotate in five dimensions and it enters this cutting nozzle right here the garnet and the water are mixing together and it's exiting out of this nozzle at way above the speed of sound combining into this stream and this is what actually does the cutting so now let's talk about how the garnet actually gets here also it has its own path on how we get to the cutting head so let's go talk about that now why do we need garnet well a garnet is an abrasive it's a hard natural mineral that would get to mind and the garnet is what's actually hitting the material and causing some erosion to whatever we're cutting and it's a more garnet you can throw at it typically the faster you can cut or you can combine it with water and speed up that garnet even faster and make it cut faster in that way too so this is a two thousand pound pallet I choose to get the garnet in bags so it's just easier to handle for me you can get big bag big sacks of the just straight garnet there's not individually wrapped and these are what are they 55 pounds and prices for garnet man they vary there's the commodity so it's gonna go it's gonna arrange but this is you can find these bags between depend on how many you buy for four to seven dollars probably a bag depending how much you buy okay basically walk through the process we're gonna take the bag and we're going to put it into this hopper this is one of the negatives of having a waterjet machine is just the garnet handling and you got a load it and this is just what you do you just cut the bag open and you fill the and you fill the hopper okay and you dispose of the bag just like that put the lid back on and off you go okay this is what the garnet looks like it's kind of hard to see right this will actually hold what's eight hundred pounds it doesn't look like if it'll hold quite a bit the hopper has a like a warning light so and it does get low here's the sensor right here that it just beeps at you and says hey you're running low and garnet so you probably still have a good hours worth of cutting when that light comes on so it's just more annoying than anything there's a diaphragm in here like a like a bladder so it's a rubber bladder that squeezes just like that when I once when it's asking for a more garnet flow to the head the bladder opens up and it closes opens it closes inside here and it does that from air pressure so the shop air you've got you need quite a bit I have 53 CFM air compressor a rotary screw air compressor here in the shop I'm thinking you're probably need at least 20 CFM to be able to run this machine and or your other shop tools and it needs clean dry air to operate this but that's basically how it works that when the computer control is asking for garnet it gets funneled down and do this hose you can see it it's just draped down here on the floor okay you can see it running behind me and it's in this clear hose this is all full of garnet and it just makes its way through the Machine and through the track and it's just getting pushed up by vacuum and the air pressure is just pushing it up into the Machine and into the gantry and up and over and in and you can see the garnet come into this little make chamber right here and if we take this off you have what you call a metering disk this is what controls how much garnet is getting sucked into the machine because remember this is has a vacuum it would suck your finger make sure it like a carburetor in a car you don't want to run too rich a fuel and you don't want to be too lean either because the computer knows how much garnet is supposed to be flowing so it's going to change its speed accordingly to the thickness of material and when you get a clog you take this apart and you have blow the line out and you're off you're running again is the garnet reusable after it's come out of a nozzle can you recycle it and the answer is yes and no there there are machines that you can now clean the tank out put this garnet into a machine it will separate all the yuckies from the good so you can imagine what's in the bottom of this tank there's a luminal filing steel wood plastic foam a whole bunch of stuff that's stuck in with the garnet garnet is just one of those things you want it clean it's what you don't want to have problems and to when that garden that hits the material it basically explodes so it's it doesn't have the mass that it may need to be able to cut again so yes and no but mostly no you cannot reuse it there's a few ways to get the garnet out of a tank and so you can imagine that once the tank starts to get full you're gonna want to remove it the cheapest way kind of is just to literally remove the slats and use a shovel and shovel it into a bucket or a trash can and then haul it to the dump you can tell that every pallet of garnet that goes in is going to end up the bottom so that can take a while another way to do it is I've seen guys have an excavator they'll literally scoop it out like it's dirt and hauled away that way the next way is you can actually buy from flow is a an auger system or a like it's continually cleaning the tank bakes basically in depositing the garnet outside of the tank into a big dumpster container in a big plastic bag and then you can haul it away that way Oh the best way flow recommended to me is to bring in the septic tank guys or the vacuum suckers and they'll literally just vacuum the slurry out of the bottom of the tank and you do that by yearly once a year every three months depending on how much garnett you're dumping into this thing you guys ask me what is all this thing I'm gonna do hickey hanging off the side of a cutting jet and this is an XD 5 axis head and so it tilts back and forth from this joint right here and then it actually pivots up at the top right here and what this allows you to do is this cutting jet is now able to cut in any degree up to 60 degrees so this I can lay over 60 degrees at any angle this is an accessory that flow cells this is called the compass and you put this attachment on the end here and it goes around the the nozzle and it floats up and down follows your material and it helps keep you from crashing the nozzle into your part the five axis helps with a taper because anytime you cut the water the water is actually making the causing a taper this has a compensation for removing the taper out of a part so that's why you're seeing this thing dance all over the places it's optimizing your cutting angle picture the cutting angle as the water hits the part and then the garnet in the water lose speed and it kind of trails off so it's trying to keep that trail straight and perpendicular to the part this is a I call it like the blast shield because this nozzle will lay over that far it's kind of like an umbrella to try to keep some of the spray down and these are just a consumable item for that the cutting head has a what we call an orifice and this is the first thing that the water sees and this is what actually builds up the pressure here and it looks something like this okay so check this out inside that cutting head is you have your diamond orifice which is ten thousandths of an inch it's a there is actually a little tiny diamond in there and the water now has to move through this little tiny orifice this is what pumps up the pressure and this is like holding your thumb over the end of the hose now there is a space between the diamond orifice what sits up in here in this head and the mixing tube so because of there is a space in here you can see that it's gonna actually cause a vacuum because that water is moving so fast now and it actually will suck garnet into this chamber there's a hose back here this is the garnet flow I can pull it off really oh there we go you can see there's a hose it's like that so if we want to cut with garnet we have the option there and this is how it gets into the the water mixtures from vacuum between Dimond orphis and the tungsten carbide mixing tube this is a an air actuator this is actually what turns the water on to the nozzle there's a little plunger in here that allows the water to go down this is air controlled what is the benefit of having 94 thousand psi of water pressure and the garnet to answer the first question the higher the water pressure it will help with cutting so it's kind of in the debating bowl is that oh yeah you don't need much water pressure you just need to throw more garnet at it because the garden is actually what's doing the cutting it's it's like an abrasive or sandpaper there really isn't any cutting action really going on it's more of just kind of like sanding the parts or sanding the thing apart but for there may be times where you don't need garnet as the cutting media you can run just straight water so a lot of food processing plants if you're cutting anything with scissors if you can cut a material with scissors you can run just straight water so the higher the water pressure is the the thick of the material or the more dense material you cut with just water and it's debated that you don't need this much water pressure but if you think about it the evolution of water jet machines is they've gone from 20 30 40 50 94 and I know that they're working on 120 psi water jet cutters at the moment right now so it's naturally the evolution of the machine the more water pressure the better having the higher water pressure doesn't necessarily mean faster cutting times it's just gonna help you with garnet consumable it's going to help you not have to use so much garnet this uses about a a little bit less than one pound a minute a flow rate of garnet so if you can cut that down it's gonna save you money on cutting parts as your overhead costs one of the most popular questions that's come through is that what can this machine actually cut and the answer really is just about anything really everything from metal to food so this machine it gets used in a food processing believe it or not your chicken nuggets that you eat are probably cut on a water jet the Cheesecake that gets cut cut on a water jet thick material like steel no problem this machine's capabilities is about inch and a half I have cut three inch thick plate with it the thicker the material just the slower it goes what I've noticed when I'm cutting something is it's cutting about the speed of a bandsaw the surface finish I can change the surface finish how I want it to be if I want it to be a smooth cut like that I just slow the Machine down a little bit so as some versatility there it's not limited just by cutting a piece of solid you can stack sheet metal on top of each other and it'll just blast through the layers of material it really doesn't care like I said if you're not careful it'll cut through your material and through the the floor of the machine if you keep it one place too long so it really is not limited to by the thickness tube steel you can cut through one side of the tube steel and it'll poke out the other side which is good and bad there is some sometimes if you don't want to cut through a layer you're gonna have to add a diffuser material in between so just picture that nozzle that water like a laser beam when you shine it through it's just going to keep going the material doesn't have to be clean that the water jet cuts you can see it's rusty they're going to be middle scale on it it can have paint it can have it can have grease it can I mean it just cuts right through it one of the parts do come off the tank they are clean and bright almost sandblasted like so the first thing you want to do is just hit them with a blast of clean water to get the garnet off of it and then blow them down with compressed air to dry them and then they normally don't rest after that but the Machine does not care for their rusty or not you can turn the pressure down you don't always have to cut at maximum pressure and you can etch a surface I actually have plans to make a cool chessboard and an etch a surface into it and make a chessboard so you kind of think about some ideas about doing that kind of stuff too let's throw this piece of quarter-inch plate on here and the Machine knows that it can't come too close to the edge because it'll actually poke a hole through the side of the tank with the water over traveling so I just know that from experience that I got to push it in more this is one thing you have to talk about is just the material handling my favorite tool is this magnet which I keep over here on the side of the machine all the time this little magnet will do 250 pounds I love it so much that started carrying them on the website so that you guys have easier access to finding them this is a Meg switch product and it will do I think 250 pounds one of them which is fantastic well the other reasons that I like its size so that if I can stick it to a part that I've cut out and I can just grab it and pull it out too so it's really cool for that so if you have a small plasma cutter this is a great option and a forklift to use flow gives you these cool little toggle clamps and they sit on top of these six-inch ribs these are disposable or they're a consumable product you can see it just cuts right through them you're gonna see the just blast right through the support ribs and they're in an s-curve so that there there's no vibration and this goes underneath the rib and then holds your part down so it just kind of goes down like this give your 90 and then of course you your run the screw down first thing I do in the morning as I come and turn the main power to the pump on and then I come to the control panel on the side of the machine and I give it power and control panel it's got a hard drive that's stuffed underneath here and all the exterior controls are all waterproofed we have basically two programs we have the design and drawing software and that's called flow path and then you have flow cut which is how we control where we want the machine to go so the first thing I do is I go into flow path so let's just draw a simple 2x2 square okay and now once I have the square drawn order your drawing I want to select it and then I want to auto path it so basically it's saying it's creating a path for the it's gonna talk to the machine and tell it where to go and then I'm gonna go into flow cut all I got to do is just import it so now we have to say here's our square that we drew I want to give it its parameters so you type in how thick you want to go and then you select the material that you're cutting and it's labeled from easiest to cut rubber all you can see all these different programmable materials so you select your material Delrin fiberglass kevlar micarta phenolic nylon quartz limestone brake pad really a brake pad on there it's funny and these are all what Flo has set up to known for speed I want how quickly the machine should cut for the hardness and we're still scrolling through all the way to gray iron stainless steel and then the hardest is tungsten up here and PCD whatever PCD is somebody in the comments will know what PCD is let me know so let's select we're just using mild steel so I'm gonna select whoops passed it miles D all right there and the tool radius this is actual diameter of the water that's coming out and I know this is 18 okay and then up here in the corner these are our percentages so 20 percent being the best 100 being the fastest and then of course you can do custom speeds in between there so let's do 60 percent cut speed and I hit okay that's what I want to do and I hit run machine and when we first started up we wanted to see all the axes what you dis did and as you can see I can move it around with my controls on the computer I can go left I can move it right back and forth so before we get started to cut this little square out I want to give you an audible sound of the garnet as it breaks the sound barrier so I'm going to bring the head of the cutting about 12 inches above the water and I'm going to hit water on so water is only going to be coming out of the nozzle and then I'm gonna hit the button and turning abrasive on and then you're gonna hear the difference between the two so water on vs. water and garnet you're gonna hear the garden that break the sound barrier so let's do that right now it's kind of fun okay pumps coming on water only coming on now okay abrasive on brace of off water off pump off I like to do that test if I have a clog inside the nozzle and I know that I make sure that my garnet is flowing good if I don't have running the compass that nozzle can get too close to the surface and plug the the mixing tube up to where you got to take it all apart and then clean it back out again but this is a test that I like to do just to make sure my garden is flowing so the first step that we got to do is find home so what I got to do is I just position the the work where I want to do my cutting and I drop it down the cutting head to one hundred thousandths off the work surface and then I zero it and then call that machine home and then that will line everything up from the computer and the machine are now thinking they're in the same place and then I just find out where I want to cut so let's just bring it to the edge right about there and now basically we're ready to cut all I have to do is turn the pumps on and hit go we're going to make a first cut we're cutting this square pump on [Music] here we go so that took only a few seconds and what you can see is that the part fell out what we can do is we can add what you call a little tab and it's just a little piece of metal that's gonna hang on so it doesn't fall on the tank so this is another drawback of a water jet machine is that your parts will fall into the abyss we can put a backing board underneath it's called rhino board it's kind of like a a honeycomb plate and it'll prevent that from happening to so here's here's the square and what I like about the software too is I can pick this entity and say I want to give it a specific cut quality so maybe this this edge is going to be visual or something so I can select it and I'm gonna hit 20% which means that's gonna have a really good cut quality let's just walk it around let's just like this one is 40% let's select this one at 60% this one at 80% and this one at 100 percent so when what this part comes out we'll be able to look at all the different cut qualities alright let's raise the water tank and inside of this tank is a steel bladder that we come pump full of air and it's just gonna displace the water inside the tank and that we can raise and lower the water pretty quickly it should be a little bit quieter and we're gonna cut this rectangle out now so let's try that [Applause] that was a hundred percent cut right there now we're going to do a 20 percent cut so slowed way down [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] cool let's look at that look at that there's no cleanup it's super nice I mean look how dirty this is this is 20 percent this is 40 percent on the side that still looks really good you can kind of start seeing a little bit jagged teeth 60% 80% cut qualities getting a little bit more Chowdhury and then there's a hundred percent so overall not too bad okay we're gonna make this funny elliptical I this is a 45 degree chamfer on the outside and inside on this quarter inch plate this would be super hard to replicate if you didn't have a machine like this I wouldn't even know how I would make this part so let's let's cut it out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] mm-hmm so here's something cool to look for is that you want to cut it upside down so you don't trap the part underneath that would be this is just a random sample part just for fun that I just sketched up real quick but this is a 45-degree on the ellipse so that's pretty cool so when it's cut upside down like that the part isn't trapped if we were to cut it like this which the machine could do also we would have to unbolt the plate to get the part out so you got to be smarter than the Machine I guess you get yourself to trap parts but how cool is that man the capabilities just mind-blowing and that edge is razor sharp pretty cool huh all right same test through some wood that's scary [Applause] whoa well that was so epically cool look at that what was cool is this was supposed to be calibrated for quarter-inch plate so okay but that was just pretty cool I've never done anything like that before I normally don't goof around at this machine like that because this is not a toy but yes it'll cut wood as you guys can see it's a highly versatile machine it may not be as fast as a laser or a plasma cutter but this offers a lot of versatility for me here in the shop it's also going to be making production parts for me in the future and then it's gonna help me with some prototyping in between those production runs that's kind of why I chose the water jets for its versatility if you'd like to see more the water jet in action be sure to check out the go kart belt grinder build thank you guys for watching I thoroughly enjoy sharing this machine with you guys and you're definitely going to be seeing it in many many many more videos to come so please leave your comments down below ring the bell if you are subscribed so you get updated with new videos and I'll catch you on the next one you

Channel: Fireball Tool

Views: 4,066,993

Rating: 4.6980634 out of 5

Keywords: Waterjet walkaround, fireball, tool, water jet, water jet cutter, waterjet cutting, waterjet channel, water jet cutting, water cutting, amazing inventions, fireball tool, water jet machining, water cutting steel, water jet review, flow water jet, 5 axis water jet, water cutter, cutting with water, high pressure water cutter, omax waterjet, mach 500, waterjet review, how does a waterjet work, flow vs omax

Id: 3yV-uJHla58

Length: 36min 0sec (2160 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2019