Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamHeard
AFAIK, 359 is the only team that has a production style waterjet in their shop. They'd be good people to ask for this.
Unless you have a pretty full set of other machines, the price that goes into a waterjet is probably better spent on the combined set of; manual mill(s), manual lathe(s), Drill press (etc...), 4x4 or 4x8 Gantry Router, and a VMC.
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A small correction... 1983 has an OMAX Maxiem 1515 "production" waterjet in our shop also. We actually had ours before 359. We moved into a new high school three years ago and I got to help design our "proto-typing" shop.
We just didn't bring it up on CD.
We decided on a waterjet for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that one of our sponsors is OMAX (who make waterjets) Actually they are the original inventor of the technology and along with FLOW waterjets are located here in the Seattle Area.
OMAX makes a series of less expensive waterjets (the Maxiem series) that are well less than $100 K including everything. We paid full price for ours after obtaining a federal grant for our new school. I don't think we paid more than $75,000
We do not find that the estimates of operating costs mentioned earlier are as high as stated. I don't budget for anything for our waterjet and we have mentors that were trained at OMAX that do all of the operating. We have a source for free abrasive (its not really sand... it is crushed garnet) and we go through about a ton or a ton and 1/2 of abrasive a year. Even if you have to purchase it .. a full year's worth is well less than $1000.
We cut for many teams in the area and our shop is pretty busy during build season helping other teams cut parts and also showing how to do fabrication that utilizes the waterjet.
The only costs we have are water filters and electricity which is paid for by the school. The water filters are donated by OMAX and they also help with any maintenance. Occasionally we have a few other parts to purchase/get donated. The one large advantage of a waterjet over a CNC mill is that tooling is almost non-required other than the tip unit. Of course the mill can do things the waterjet can't but it is also much slower.
Someone mentioned the rebuilding of the pump... which could be pricey but it is not that difficult actually and in the OMAX training (which is included with the machine) the trainees do a complete pump rebuild. The parts are not that much either.
There are definitely some quirks to keeping the abrasive flowing and some other light maintenance activities but the operation is really pretty easy. I am not saying it is as easy as a laser cutter (high school type) but it can cut literally any material and our machine can handle 5' X 4' sheets.
I chose the waterjet because I believe that designing in 2d CNC is a simpler way to start learning to design. It requires the student to think about the fabrication while designing and because we are in an Aerospace Industrial area... (50 feet from our shop is an airpark with the original 747 and 787 and a number of other planes from biplanes to WW2 bombers, and a Space Shuttle full scale demo from NASA is in a building on our same block)
If you want any other information regarding setting up a waterjet or using one I would be happy to respond. We have found it to be incredibly valuable to both our team and the 20+ teams that we have helped build their robots by cutting their designs on this machine.
thanks
and if you are in the area... come by and take a look.