Waterjet and
Abrasivejet pictures (Page 10):
Waterjet Wood Cutting:
Every once in a while someone asks if waterjets can be used for cutting
wood. Yes, they can be. In some cases, it's practical
because of shape or tolerance issues, or simply because that's the
machine that's available and easiest to use. In other cases, it's
not really that practical, because there are other machines that can
cut wood quite well, and very cheaply.
Here is a recent
wood cutting project I worked on with my nephiew Elliot. We
started out with a CAD drawing of the base of a guitar. It was in
3 sections. A thin section for the top, a thick section in the
middle, and a thin layer on the bottom:
.
The wood in this case was "Peruvian Maple", which turned out to be
about $500 worth for just barely enough wood to do the job. So,
we were careful!
Above: We started by outlining the spot on the wood where we wanted to
cut. For aesthetic reasons, we wanted the grain orientation to be
lined up in a certain way with the shape of the guitar.
We lined up the material under the nozzle, and rotated the tool
path so that when dry ran, the nozzle followed the chalk line
previously drawn. ("dry running" is running the machine through the
path with the nozzle turned off. It's a great way to verify that
it's going to do what you think it's going to do, prior to actually
cutting your expensive material. When you only have one piece of
material to do the job, and a replacement has to be shipped 8000 miles
after being carved out of the rain forest, you dry-run.)
...cutting in progress on one of the thinner pieces... You might
giggle a bit about the above fixturing - just a bunch of scrap with
weights, but it worked fine and was easy to do. Perhaps we
over-did it a bit, but when in doubt put more fixturing on than
needed. Waterjets don't put much load on the part being cut, but
stuff can still shift around, and since we only had one chance to make
a perfect cut, we fixtured a bit on the paranoid side.
...cutting in progress...
...the final cut around the outside.
...and the finished cut.
You might note that one thing cool about waterjets, is that you are
left with useful left overs. With a $500 piece of wood, the above
scrap is worth something to somebody.
Above: Elliot holds his masterpiece. It was equipped with a
carbon fiber neck, and a bunch of electronics, then hand polished for a
few days. The sound is incredible. The next step is to
figure out how to interface it with PlasmaVis....
A couple of notes about cutting wood with a waterjet:
- Wood cuts easily and quickly.
- Wood gets wet. We took care not to get it wetter than
necessary by cutting above water.
- Wood is soft: We also took care to cut over "waterjet brick" (the
plastic grating you see in the above pictures), so that the jet would
not ricochet off the typical metal slats, and mar the bottom side of
the wood.
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