We have a waterjet …. almost… really
Wouldn´t it be amazing if we had a waterjet and all the Makers in Brussels could use it?
A waterjet will cut anything. With a waterjet you can make robots in aluminium or in stainless steel. You can cut granite. You can cut carbon composites. You can disect a laptop and cut it in half.
You also need 150’000 euro for a good one.
Auch!
So we thought this wouldn´t happen for years and it was a bit of a pipe dream…
But then Jeroen came across a disused, disassembled, second-hand watercutter at an auction in Holland, and the auction would be ending in 2 days but it looked like really good machine and maybe we could get it cheaply so we went to the head of the industrial engineering department and said if we could buy it at a tenth of the price it was a steal and it was the right size to fit in our lab and we were quite sure we could get it running again and if he could borrow the money we could figure out later how to earn it back and he said yes…
…and we won the auction.
Where we are at
-We have a 1400mmx1400mm 38kW 4000 bar 4,5 ton waterjet in our Fablab
-We owe our head of department 15000 euro that we agreed to pay back, somehow
-At this point we verified the machine moves, and the pump works. We can send G-code to the machine. The drives and all the expensive parts are good.
-We still need to connect the high-pressure line in a way that it fits inside the room and need to buy some parts for this.
-The computer is really old (itś XP) and we need to replace it with a modern controller.
-The PLC in the pump has had its memory erased or is faulty. We can get new parts for it, it may need to be replaced.
-So we need to spend a bit more time and money to get it running, but we have assured ourselves the machine was more than worth the money and it will live again.
-We should have it up and running at the latest by the end of May.
