Water Jet

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naijin
Vectric Craftsman
Posts: 114
Joined: Wed Dec 18, 2013 10:25 am
Model of CNC Machine: home made

Water Jet

Post by naijin »

Hi there, is it possible to use V Carve Pro to write G Code and tool paths for a water jet cutter, must have lead in tool path and dwell tool path, if so is anyone out there actually using this type of set up, the water jet has been converted to UCCNC using the AXBB-E controller,
Is there a tutorial on creating dwell and lead in tool paths? any information is always greatly appreciated.
Regards
Nick :D :?: :D

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Tex_Lawrence
Vectric Wizard
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Joined: Fri Mar 25, 2016 11:30 am
Model of CNC Machine: Shapeoko3XXL; JTech7W; V-CarvePro 11.554
Location: Dayton, Texas (Don't Mess With My Texas!)

Re: Water Jet

Post by Tex_Lawrence »

Does a water jet work in a way similar to a laser cutter? The laser toolpath might be a way into Vectric software.
Tex — Crooked Wood Products
Now there's a man with an open mind – you can feel the breeze from here.

naijin
Vectric Craftsman
Posts: 114
Joined: Wed Dec 18, 2013 10:25 am
Model of CNC Machine: home made

Re: Water Jet

Post by naijin »

I think it is very similar, the water jet needs to have lead in tool path and dwell as well, first it will cuta hole through the material at the lead in, thus the dwell, once it is through the material it then follow the lead in to reach the actual shape to cut and proceeds to cut at the full depth of the material until the shape is cut.

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Adrian
Vectric Archimage
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Joined: Thu Nov 23, 2006 2:19 pm
Model of CNC Machine: ShopBot PRS Alpha 96x48
Location: Surrey, UK

Re: Water Jet

Post by Adrian »

Very similar to a plasma cutter as well. Plenty of people using those. A forum search for Plasma will bring up lots of info.

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adze_cnc
Vectric Wizard
Posts: 4324
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2013 10:08 pm
Model of CNC Machine: AXYZ 4008
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Re: Water Jet

Post by adze_cnc »

I looked into this for our institution's newly purchased WAZER machine. The largest difficulty is piercing timing. That is the machine turns the jet on at the start of a path segment and waits until the material has been completely penetrated before moving along the path.

The pierce time varies both with material used and with material thickness. So, unless you can store those times in the Vectric program to be automatically calculated and included when creating the g-code you'll need to add a stub to the post processor file so that you can later use a text editor to search and replace that stub with the appropriate value for every path start.

GeneMpls
Vectric Craftsman
Posts: 193
Joined: Sun Nov 04, 2012 4:27 pm
Model of CNC Machine: PRS Buddy48alpha ,4x6' 130w laser, Wazer

Re: Water Jet

Post by GeneMpls »

We bought a Wazer 3-4 years ago and have never used it because of the crappy software it uses. I tried for a long time to get them to switch to other laser software software [excellent software for Chicom CO2 lasers] and even talked to the software creator [who is a member of our laser machine tool control software forum] who said he could do it easily enough. I did not think about Aspire... and now I am too old. Gene

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