Which Waterjet Edge Quality Does Your Part Need?
If you want top-quality results at a fraction of the cost of traditional CNC machining, our waterjet cutting service is an excellent alternative.
A waterjet cutter is an industrial tool that uses an extremely high-powered stream of water mixed with garnet abrasives to cut through a variety of surfaces from wood to paper to metal.
Because it uses water instead of heat, waterjet cutting doesn’t warp, damage, or change the properties of the material you’re working with.
It’s perfect for materials that are sensitive to high temperatures and those that could have the surface integrity affected. The resulting hardened edges make subsequent operations more difficult to cut.
Comment materials for waterjet cutting include:
Tool steel
Aluminum
Titanium
Stainless steel
Clear Lexan
Rubber sheet
Teflon
Plastic
Waterjet cutters are also powerful enough to cut complex designs, sharp corners, holes, and small radii with the most excellent “edge quality”—a term describing how rough the edge of a cut part appears and the perpendicularity of the cut.
Waterjet edge qualities typically range from Q1 to Q5--with Q5 having the best, most accurate edge quality.
5 Options for Waterjet Edge Quality
Unsure about what kind of edge quality you need for your part? We’ve prepared a guide to break the different options down for you.
Lower quality options (Q1-Q3) are best used for parts that will undergo further machining operations because in those cases precision isn’t as important. If you simply need to cut the material before performing an operation like milling or welding, lower quality options will get the job done quickly at the lowest possible price.
Higher quality options (Q4-Q5), on the other hand, can be used as a single operation for parts that need an excellent cosmetic appearance, perpendicularity and higher dimensional accuracy . Q5 requires no additional finishing processes and is suitable for parts that can’t be made with CNC machining. It’s also a great choice for parts that could be CNC milled, but using the waterjet saves time and cost.
Arbiser Machine’s Unparalleled Waterjet Cutting Services
We invest heavily in our equipment and training because we’ve seen firsthand the powerful capabilities and top-notch quality waterjet cutting offers.
Here are some of the features that set our waterjet cutting services apart from other machine shops:
Highest quality garnet abrasives. Most shops don’t care about the quality of the garnet abrasives they use, but we do. Having the highest quality garnet allows us to achieve exceptional edge quality for your parts.
Automatic taper technology. Our automatic taper technology is additional hardware on the machine that ensures that when we’re doing square cuts, the edges remain square and true and increases overall accuracy of the cut.
Laser beam locator and computer vision alignment. These features help make our setups as fast and accurate as possible.
Different nozzles and fine grades of garnet. We analyze where we can cut with or without garnet, and when we should move to a finer grit for a finer cut. We’re careful to tailor each process according to application and materiality. When we cut laminate with many sheets, for example, we do so without bursting water between the layers.
Waterjet cutting is so fast and cost-effective that we often choose this capability over CNC machining. But we’re always willing to machine a part instead if that’s your preference.
Our goal with waterjet cutting is to make our customers say, “I would never guess that was waterjet!” We’ll typically default to Q5 edge quality for the most precise cuts. But if you need the lowest possible price for waterjet cutting services, let us know and we’ll do a Q1-Q3 cut.
Request a quote today and see for yourself how waterjet cutting improves cost and lead time for your project!
