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Waterjet Maintenance: How bad is it?

BlastedBilly

Plastic
Joined
Apr 21, 2013
Location
Miami
Hi all,
Considering getting a 4x8 waterjet at work, but the boss is concerned with maintenance. This is not something that will be used daily. It may sit for a week or longer between jobs. Is there any extra maintenance involved if it is going to sit like that? How bad is the maintenance in general? Thank you all in advance!
 
Well... it depends. You could do "maintenance" like a job or so ago did with our wedm machines - wait until it won't run and fix it.. ;) Then it is cheap... until that HOT job comes up.
 
That's a big investment for a machine that "may sit for a week or longer between jobs" ...

Any way you look at it, waterjet maintenance is not cheap, and labor intensive.

There are ways to mitigate this.

Waterjets.org – The most complete waterjet resource on the web

Recommended reading there: "How Abrasive Waterjets Work" and the "Article Archive".

I also recommend you look for a 6' x 12' machine.

If you really use it, it won't be long before a 4' x 8' just isn't big enough.
 
We have operated a waterjet in a prototyping shop for a decade. It racks 80-100 hours of on time per year. We did a couple of pump rebuilds during that time, and then had an Omax tech came in and do their major annual maintenance work, but after ten years not one. I think our guys could have done the maintenance but everyone was very busy at the time so it made sense to bring in some outside help. We also dig the tank out about once a year, so per 100 hours or so. Waterjets can be an extremely productive machine where in our automation field for example, you design machines with 90% of the machine-specific parts water jet, one or two CNC'd and then rest purchased. We have a press brake and on side powder coating as well we walk in the shop and walk out with finished parts. This makes it super efficient to iterate designs. It's also easy to train people on so all my engineers can just go in and make parts, leaving shop staff to concentrate on challenging CNC projects. So in that sense you massively increase your shop capacity since you enable a floating workforce for yourself.
 
As said by the previous posts, maintenance can be quite involved. At a shop I used to work at we had some issues beyond just the constant pump rebuilds and the periodic slog of digging out all the abrasive mud. Most critically was the water temperature, the shop had a water line up on the roof exposed to the sun which heated the water and exacerbated pump overheat issues. Another was the dissolved minerals in the water which necessitated a reverse osmosis kit (I think this is standard but it bears pointing out since it increases your water usage by about double from what is shooting out the nozzle).

If you only need it once in a while why not get a gantry router/plasma torch? They are way easier to maintain and do basically the same thing and are far less expensive. The main reason to go for waterjet is the ease of use (read: easy to train personnel) and the productivity which makes sense if you gotta cut stuff all the time.
 
We have operated a waterjet in a prototyping shop for a decade. It racks 80-100 hours of on time per year. We did a couple of pump rebuilds during that time, and then had an Omax tech came in and do their major annual maintenance work, but after ten years not one. I think our guys could have done the maintenance but everyone was very busy at the time so it made sense to bring in some outside help. We also dig the tank out about once a year, so per 100 hours or so. Waterjets can be an extremely productive machine where in our automation field for example, you design machines with 90% of the machine-specific parts water jet, one or two CNC'd and then rest purchased. We have a press brake and on side powder coating as well we walk in the shop and walk out with finished parts. This makes it super efficient to iterate designs. It's also easy to train people on so all my engineers can just go in and make parts, leaving shop staff to concentrate on challenging CNC projects. So in that sense you massively increase your shop capacity since you enable a floating workforce for yourself.

When it's busy here we do that per week, on multiple jets ...
 
We run our machine 5-10 hours a week, with occasional big jobs that run 6-8 hours a day five days a week.

No additional maintenance due to down time.

We're prototyping mostly rather than doing production. We teach a lot of classes so noise can be an issue at times.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
500 hours between rebuilds for us too. But to KilrB's point, if you run up huge hours quickly, yes you end up doing more frequent rebuilds, but you should be cutting stuff other methods can't cut and making money accordingly. The big advantage of a water jet is the versatility; if you expect to mostly cut stuff which can be cut with plasma or laser, get one of those. I need to send a template to the shop later this afternoon to test whether a proposed design will fit into a larger machine. The template will be made from plywood, which will waterjet in seconds. Then later they need to cut some carbon fiber sheet, and then back to 18 Ga CRMS for an electronics control box. That's where the value is.
 
We have operated a waterjet in a prototyping shop for a decade. It racks 80-100 hours of on time per year. We did a couple of pump rebuilds during that time, and then had an Omax tech came in and do their major annual maintenance work, but after ten years not one. I think our guys could have done the maintenance but everyone was very busy at the time so it made sense to bring in some outside help. We also dig the tank out about once a year, so per 100 hours or so. Waterjets can be an extremely productive machine where in our automation field for example, you design machines with 90% of the machine-specific parts water jet, one or two CNC'd and then rest purchased. We have a press brake and on side powder coating as well we walk in the shop and walk out with finished parts. This makes it super efficient to iterate designs. It's also easy to train people on so all my engineers can just go in and make parts, leaving shop staff to concentrate on challenging CNC projects. So in that sense you massively increase your shop capacity since you enable a floating workforce for yourself.

I second this. I have had an OMAX 55100 that was bought cheaply used (broken due to electrical damage) in 2011. We use it a few hundred hours per year tops and have yet to need to rebuild anything other than replacing mixing tubes and abrasive removal. Even if I need to do a major rebuild tomorrow I would be very happy with the longevity of the "slow consumables" on this machine.
 








 
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