Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Wazer: Desktop Waterjet Cutting”.
Hey this is mike sinisi executive editor for make magazine, and i’m with nissan lorea, who is the ceo and co-founder of wazer, a personal desktop sized water jet cutter? I’M super excited about this thing. Look at it, so nissan um. This is the first machine of its kind. There’S nothing else like this. How did this come about? What’S what’s the path that you’ve gone to, to create this yeah, so it started out as a research project.
We were all engineering students and we didn’t have access to a water jet cutter. So the goal was: let’s try to build a small scale, low-cost water jet – that was back in 2012, we worked for a few years, developed our engineering skills at other companies and then mid last year, my co-founder matt and i quit our jobs to start to develop. This full-time water, jet cutters, the ones i know, they’re huge, uh, they’re huge. They require massive infrastructure, a crazy psi just for the water pressure that is required for for cutting anything um. What were some of the big challenges? Taking something? That’S such normally such a burdensome beast and making it functional in a smaller size like this yeah. So what we’ve had to do is, like you said, big water jets are operate at super high pressure and use specialty components, and what we’ve done is: we’ve had to leverage hydraulic components from other industry using off-the-shelf components, combining it with some customization to make a machine. That’S both affordable, but still has substantial cutting power got it and what type of materials can this do? It can cut virtually any material, so it cuts through steel, titanium, aluminum, but also glass, stone, ceramic tile and carbon fiber, even even titanium yeah, that’s cool thickness um. So it really varies um depending on the material and it cuts.
You know, thinner materials than the big water jets and not as quickly, but it can still cut through 3 16 inch. Steel quarter inch aluminum, 3, 8 inch, glass, 3, 8 stone and it varies by material okay. So let’s get a close look at all of this um. Can we open the hood yeah sure all right? So what are we looking at in here yeah? So this is the cutting bed and you fixture your material directly to it right now. We’Ve got four different materials placed that we can cut simultaneously or one after another. We’Ve got glass, gasket material, soda can and circuit board, and this is the what we refer to. As the cutting head, so high pressure, water comes in from the pump unit and into this hose, and then the abrasive particles get fed in from the side, so the pump unit can live on the floor or in a different area. It’S connected to the machine through the high pressure line, but all the controls are on the machine. So once you set once you hook up the pump unit to a water source and a drain source, then you don’t really need to ever touch it. What other requirements does this need? Electricity? What’S a operating voltage 110 to 20 110, so it works off of standard 110 volt outlets, so this is good for just every household could get one of these up and yeah get going.
That was that was one of our initial requirements is that you know it needed to run off of 110 so that it could, you know, be in any workshop in a basement in a garage, any sort of environment, for that a maker might have this thing’s all Set up, we can fire it up and we could do a little demo cut on it right, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. Let’S do it so the first thing that you do when you want to operate the machine is make sure that lasers got abrasive um. You could pour some extra in here now: we’ve integrated the abrasive hopper into the machine, which is a nice feature so that it’s all contained into one machine.
The only other thing we’ve got to do is this: it’s a manual z adjustment for the height, so we have this little spacer here, put it in loosen the z set it and it’s good to go. So this is a mock-up of the software that we’ll be providing with the machine you still design your drawing in whatever design software you’re used to whether it’s cad or solidworks or adobe illustrator you export either a dxf or svg. One of the parts that we’ve cut is a sprocket.
Now you load it in there’s a couple of things you can do. You can orient it on the cutting area. You can specify whether you want the cut to be the center line of your drawing the inside or on the outside kind of the. You know three options for the same thing as a laser cutter.
We have the option for providing for adding additional tabs. So that way, when the little holes get cut out those little pieces, don’t um float up, they’re called pop-ups and they can get caught under the cutting head and jam. So it’s a little thing that um, typically wan na have them have the option of adding tabs. So those things stay attached to the main part, and then you just break them off afterwards and then you would just specify the material, the material thickness and the cut quality that you want, and then you press cut and it gives you some little information.
This was a sprocket all right, so then, from here let’s say: we’ve with the with the demo that we cut here. You guys you’ll plug in the laptop, and we can cut these letters out next. Yeah yeah, that’s right great now and once you’re done the abrasive collects in these buckets over here, and so we can dump out this abrasive. Conveniently am i able to pull these out yeah yeah? You should be able to just pop those pieces out.
So we’re live on kickstarter on monday september 12th. Um and you know we’re going to be offering the machine there and then you know, we’ve got ta. Uh figure out the final put the fine final. You know: we’ve got ta launch on kickstarter, offering the machine and then you know, got ta put the finishing touches on it, and we’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure that it ships and make sure that ship’s on time have you guys specced Out a rough estimate delivery for when you think you might be shipping yeah it’ll be in the fall of next year. Great! Well, um! Good luck with everything! Thank you! Yeah! I’M i’m blown away.
I can’t wait to see what everybody does with this nice yeah. We’Re really excited um. We’Re really excited to get this machine out there. We’Re really excited to see what everyone can make with it very cool all right. Thanks thanks a lot you .