For coolness, this is the real deal, but now that it is out in the world some drawbacks are revealed. Number one is 30 dollars an hour for abrasive cost. I would imagine some materials would cut with just the water pressure but it does not say so and this machine at 30mpascal puts it into high end pressure washer category and does not reach the 50 to 100 mega-pascal ranges of affordable industrial cutting machines which CAN cut some softer materials without abrasive usage (they seem to use it as a marketing brag) so abrasive may be needed for everything. Dunno.
I have maintained vortex feeds like they use for the abrasive feed, and they work like an awesome vacuum with no moving parts, until they don’t, and failure can have messy consequences. Hopefully they have knowledge of this and have preventive measures and checklists in place.
The bed is a collateral damage element as well. No knowledge of the cost for replacement beds.
The biggest attraction in my opinion (beyond cutting metals) is stained glass, which thankfully cuts rather quickly on this machine, and that helps mitigate the hourly charges since stained glass sells extremely well (as well as pseudo stained glass projects using translucent plastics).
I will let the videos included below show if this machine is a good fit in your maker space.
Myself, I am still leaning towards some version of desktop CNC in the near future. Enjoy…
Yeah I couldn’t get past the media costs. Cool idea just not for me… I’d have to have specific needs to justify that kind of up-front and operating cost.
Gives me the same feeling as I had about the GF crowd fund - but back then I could think of things to laser, lots of things in fact. Now I’ve got a laser I find it much harder to think of things I want to waser.
Glass is an interesting choice, could think of a few things to sell made from glass, there are probably a couple of other materials like that.
But I’ve got my industrial sized omtech that does all the lasering I need - and which takes up lots of space. I don’t need another machine that is big - bit also wet!
Maybe if I had an american sized workshop instead of a UK sized one
That abrasive also cuts the nozzle away so that is also ablative and a consumable. I was very excited about them several years ago, and you can make cuts in glass that nothing else will. If I had a stained glass shop doing well I would consider it, maybe even doing tiles, but even there a diamond band saw could accomplish much of the need.
The media costs estimates when this first came out was one of the big reasons I resigned myself to just watching the project develop instead of committing monetarily to getting one.
My wife spends much of her day cutting and grinding stained glass pieces to later assemble, and would love a machine that can do it for her. But at $10K plus operating costs, there’s no way we’d make the money back on this. She can’t produce enough pieces per year, all the steps beyond cutting the glass also take a lot of time and labor.
This looks like it could increase her productivity far more per dollar spent than a Wazer even just in consumables. If you just feed such saws as they cut you get far more from a blade than if you push them… https://www.amazon.com/Gryphon-AquaSaw-Diamond-Band-Saw/dp/B00Q70D52C
Not so good for engraving but the laser will do that.
