In the last couple of weeks, visitors to Wood's Powr-Grip® may have been asking themselves, “Why do the guys in production have a swimming pool?” Actually, that reservoir isn’t a swimming pool at all; in fact, the water looks kind of dirty and you certainly wouldn’t want to swim in it. The big pool is a WardJet Z-613 water-jet cutting machine, the newest addition to the Wood’s Powr-Grip machine shop. This machine will be used to speed up cut-out and machining for a large portion of the parts that we make in house. Additionally, it will allow us to begin making parts in house that we are currently outsourcing.

The water-jet machine uses an intensifier pump to pressurize water to 60,000 psi [413685 kPa]. Then the pressurized water is forced through a very tiny hole which accelerates the water to around 2200 miles [3541 km] per hour, mixes it with abrasive garnet, and blasts it out of a nozzle in a very small, controlled stream. This creates an extreme amount of energy in a tiny area, which can be used to slice through virtually any material, with incredible accuracy. The cutting is controlled by a CNC program that can be set up to cut almost any two-dimensional shape in flat materials up to 10" [25 cm] thick, including stainless steel.

The real beauty of this machine is its extremely fast set-up and programming: It will now be much easier to set up and cut parts quickly without having to worry about loading multiple tools and programming for them, or risking fingers to cut out two-dimensional shapes with a band saw. The abrasive garnet does most of the cutting, while the water is there to accelerate and focus the beam. The used garnet is basically just fine red sand which gets pumped out of the bottom of the tank and filtered out of the water. This environmentally friendly substance can simply be discarded or used as fill dirt.

Visitors to Powr-Grip are invited to stop by and see the water-jet in action. If you get a chance to check it out as it is running, you will see that it is a very impressive machine. It’s just one more way Wood’s Powr-Grip is striving to reduce production costs, while improving quality and efficiency, to keep our product prices reasonable in the expanding world of material handling equipment.