Hello I am in the market to purchase a waterjet and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions.. I have done extensive research, but still unsure as to the manufacturer... There are several in my area that I have even spoke with and have conflicting information.. Please help if able.. thanks Jimmy

One thing i can tell you is to stay away from the Jet Edge machines with the Bechhoff (sp?) controllers, they are quite slow to setup. The Bruny controllers are much faster. As far as the quality of the Jet Edge machines, I can't really say because that shop had very poor maintenance habits. Most of the time they only touched the machines after the broke down.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with the Flow my boss purchased 4 years ago. Certainly not "trouble-free", but when you're dealing with 60k psi care needs to be taken with certain things. Consumables can be pricey, so the thing does need to be making you money. I can imagine if you don't do good regular maintenance it can go to crap on you pretty easily. Seems like when something starts going wrong on the Flow it's when we're letting it get dirty. I'm not too fond of Flowpath 6 but that's just me. It's so NOT like Mastercam I just never got used to it.

Jimmy:

The salesmen are liars one and all.

If at all possible, find a shop in your area that has one or more waterjets running and see if they will talk to you.

Talk to the guys/gals that have to run and maintain them.

If you are not careful the price of consumables and maintenance costs will eat any profits.

They are always dirtier, louder, less precise, and in general more contrary than any rep will admit.

That said, we have a pair of JetEdge machines with "ATK" controllers that our waterjet guys really like.

One has a 6'x12' table and the other a 4'x8'.

Both are running 100hp intensifers.

Do not sell yourself short on table space or horsepower.

Horsepower in particular. More horsepower means you can run a larger orifice/nozzle combination, or multiple heads, to increase your productivity.

Also, do not forget that you will need room to store your abrasive. Lots of abrasive. We buy ours by the truckload.

I ran a pair of the early I/R's some years ago, but Flow and JetEdge are the big players now.

We also had an Omax for a while but I have nothing good to say about it ...

funny you mention that, we ran an OMAX and it treated us well and was relatively straight forward to program on.

my advice is to ask the sellers to give you a client list in the area and call them up and ask about their machines.

I have no experience around a water jet. I'm curious as to how much abraisive material and how often it's consumed, like for cutting different materials ? Anybody ?

Yeah i will secound that, how long does the truck load last killrb? A few days bettwen the machines or months?

it's anywhere from zero to about 1 pound per minute. so 2000 pounds would give you about 33 hours of cut time in a worst case scenario

they do have abrasive recovery systems, but I'm not sure how economical it is to recover. Crushed garnet is an industrial byproduct with not a lot of use.

We would use one bag per 16 hour day per machine, machines were cutting around 12 hours of that time. I think the bags were 3,000lb each, I'll check with one of the other ops. We used the largest grade the machine would handle and ran it with the largest nozzles and orifices, .045 and .015. Our primary concern was speed of cutting, we ran them flat out. Used abrasive was recovered and returned to the guys we bought it from, to the best of my knowledge they cleaned it and resold it as a finer grade.

Turns out the bags weigh 4500 Lbs. A lot of the time the machines would be running with two heads as well.

He told me to tell you that water jets suck to run, you wind up wet and covered in abrasive all day, every day.

Nahhhh, it all gets rinsed off when you get to go swimming for the wrench you dropped in the tank. 'Course, that water's not the cleanest either....

and tends to be full of sharp pointy slat pieces. Whats really fun is when you drop a 500Lb part that took two days to cut and it sinks all the way to the bottom.

i ran a flow 6x12 flying bridge with the 50 hp intensifier and "Dynamic waterjet" for two years at my last job. we were cutting mostly stone with some metals and glass for outside shops and our own fabrication. I would classify the ability's of this machine as nothing short of amazing wether it be 4 inch stone or 1/4" glass it performed great. only in extrreme circumstances was there any hint of taper. The intensifier pump, while seeming like it's very complicated is realy incredibly simple. It's not a cheap one. but after sending stone samples to some of the lower end manufacturers the results were so poor that we delayed for an entire year buying a machine because we didn't think that waterjet would do what we wanted. that's my experience.

Ethan

Ethan - that is great to hear. I worked directly with Flow on the 5-Axis Dynamic Waterjet kinematic engine / motion controller as a consultant. The engineers there all worked their collective butts off through a lot of problems to get it to work well. I remember seeing a 5 point star that they had cut out of 1" aluminum in the lab where the exit hole for the jet after lead in was a single point in the middle of the star - it was an amazing machine.

I have never owned a waterjet - but I have done business with Flow and from a vendor's perspective - Flow treats me and my engineers with respect, they pay their bills on time and they work hard to push the technology to the limits. I like working with customers like that.

thanks for all the input everyone.. I am looking at a 4x8 Flow IFB with a 50Hp intensifier.. Guess I should have mentioned this before.. I have been in constant contact with Flow and Omax and have a better experience with Flow.. To be honest I was really on track to purchase the Omax which would have been a 2652 model the only thing was the small size ... I do not have deep pockets so price is the main problem.. This Flow machine came available and I think I will be able to fit it in the shop and make it work... Transformer, water quality and expendable consumable pump parts is really not making this decision very easy.. Do any of you have any experience rebuilding the pumps with the water filter systems... thanks ja

the amount of work that went into the dynamic waterjet had to be huge
especially when you open up the kinematic models that control it. in trying to better understand the way the machine worked i spent probably a week staring at equations that looked like nonsense. then when it hit me what they were doing i was even more in awe.


we purchased a new machine and flow gave classes on programing and pump rebuilding for 2 men. i have my "certificate" from flow for rebuilding the intensifier. I did all the maintenance on the machine for the 2 years i operated it. it is really a very simple system. One thing i learned on our machine, with the paser 3 cutting head, flow says the on off valve is non serviceable. in my experience it is very servicable and will save you alot of money over replacing it.
as far as filters. when i was there we weren't reusing any water. all we used was the finestand bigest home water filter i could find at home depot. since i left they started recycling their water. i think they have 3 or so settling tanks and then a filter press. if you need help i can dig up all my information. i also still have a good relationship with my old boss. if i needed to i could call their new operator and get the info i need. Check out their website there are some pictures and videos of the waterjet and some of the stuff made with it

Bucks County Soapstone

Ethan

Well, it lasts a whole lot longer these days than it used to ...

Had to ask our PA as it's been a while since I worked in that dept.

Since October of last year we have used 16 2200lb bags of garnet.

This is about one-third of our usage over a similar time period up to November-December 2008.

How are you? If you'd consider looking at Jet Edge I'd like to at least send some literature to you. We have several installations in TX that you could visit or call. We do use the Beckhoff industrial PC and have found it to be bullet proof so far. MG plasma is also using the Beckhoff for all of their machines now as well. My e-mail is davida@jetedge.com. Let me know if I can help you with your investigation in any way.

h2ojetga - schlepping an advertisement on your second post is not becoming to your credibility on the site.

was not the intention. only trying to help.