Page 34 - MetalForming February 2015

Waterjet Cutting—The Right Tool for the Job
but the edge quality is superior,” Cupples says. “And, in other cases we’ve been able to substantially reduce our costs, by as much as 50 percent, opting for water- jet cutting instead of machining.”
Work for new customers represents the rest of the waterjet work. “We’re getting a lot of waterjet projects from several of the steel-service companies in the region,” Cupples notes. One interesting waterjet project of note, explains Cupples, is fabricating bar stock from thick plate.
“Last year (in mid-2014) we had a need for several feet of Type 410 stain- less-steel bar stock, for a customer manufacturing food-processing equip- ment,” he recalls, “and the mills typi- cally only make so much of that par- ticular product. Short on supply, we fabricated our own bar stock by water- jet-cutting 1.75-in.-wide bars from 3⁄4- in.-thick, 5- by 10-foot plate. On that job alone we saved $11,000 compared to purchasing the bar stock—assuming we could have found it in stock.”
Precision, from Riding Close
Cupples sees the Bystronic waterjet machine as “a precision machine tool, not just a waterjet head hanging off of a typical CNC cutting table,” he says. “Compared to other waterjet machines we’ve seen, the ByJet Smart cuts with a shorter distance between the cutting head and the workpiece, around 0.060 in. This minimizes the amount of waterjet-stream divergence and opti- mizes cut quality—edge straightness and kerf width. The more precise the machine, the more precise our cuts.”
Bystronic rates the machine to a posi- tioning accuracy of plus or minus 0.003 in./axis and repeatability of ±0.001 in./axis. Maximum positioning speed is 1100 in./min. (simultaneous x-y axes); the 9-in. Z axis allows a maximum work- piece thickness of 8 in.
Achieving such precision while posi- tioning the cutting head so close to the material requires good material, Cup- ples insists. “We buy all stretcher-lev- eled material from 16 gauge to 1 in.
thick, flat and stress relieved,” he says. “And for thicker plate, we buy the best- quality material we can find, SSAB plate. We completely switched over to stretch-leveled sheet and plate in 2011, working with Universal Steel (in Cleve- land, OH) to develop a process to laser- cut 1-in. stretcher-leveled plate.”
Universal Steel calls its stretcher- leveler the “memory eraser.” Compared to temper-passed material, a process that changes the grain structure of the material, explains Cupples, stretcher- leveling better inhibits the tendency of the material to spring back during forming,.
“Stretch-leveling elongates the grains and relaxes the material,” Cup- ples says. “The material is good and flat, so that the waterjet and laser-cut- ting heads can ride closer to the sur- face. And, we don’t experience the edge cracking during forming nor the edge hardening from laser cutting. This allows us to machine—mill the edges or drill and tap—at higher speeds.” MF
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