Something wicked(ly useful) This Way Comes

[Will M]

I just happened across this yesterday.
http://www.wazer.com/
A low cost 12"x18" cut area desktop waterjet.

Although it is much slower than a industrial water jet (1/20th the cutting speed) I think it would be well suited to FS teams that would like to make components in house but do not currently have any CNC capability.

Teams don't really need to make a huge number of parts and a 12"x18" cutting area would have covered 95% of things I made for our car.

Of course some parts would need 'regular' machine tools, but compared to buying a new Haas office mill this would offer a low cost and versatile introduction to CNC methods.

Things you could make:
Brackets
Welding jigs
Parts for weldments (uprights, bell cranks)
Composite material profiles


Thoughts?

-William

* I am not involved in any way with Wazer

[Dunk Mckay]

Not to be a nay sayer, but...

Sending things off to a professional waterjet cutter is not a complicated process. Output a .dxf from CAD and you're away. It is not an overly expensive thing to outsource, and in my experience they are usually quite timely (most work back within a week, if not days).

While having an in-house machine would be interesting, I think the up-front cost for one of these would take at least 5-10 years pay itself off in an FSAE context (add maintenance and wasted material costs because somebody got it wrong, and that goes up). And if it's 20 times slower than pro kit, I don't think you're going to be saving all that much time either. No time at all if you're planning your orders and build schedule properly.

The only benefit therefore is teaching students about manufacturing techniques. But waterjet cutting, isn't a complicated process to understand, and can be summarised with: "you can cut out any 2D shape". Compared with 3D CNC, composite mould design, casting, laser sintering, etc., I don't think there is much education benefit.

Laser cutters make more sense in university or home workshop, because they are very fast. So you can go from concept to parts in the space of an hour or two, and with the cheap materials used you can use it for prototyping. But if a wj cutter takes hours to make just a single part, which needs to be your final design, you might as well just send it to the pros.

[Will M]

Agreed, this thing is definitely not a perfect solution.
And with many shops happy to donate their machine time it will likely never pay for itself.
Some teams are likely best served by outsourcing everything.
But for the teams that like to make as much as possible in house I think this has a place.

As for education aspect I think there is still real value in learning up to set up your own processes.
When people/students treat manufacturing systems as black boxes they loose much of their ability to improve their designs.

-William