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Comment by wigiv | Hacker News Reader

Site is down, so I'm winging this comment until I can check again later or find an archive, but I wanted to note that my company has cut all kinds of fabric (and also food!) using a "water-only" (ie, no entrained abrasive) method with an ultra-high-pressure CNC waterjet.

Depending on the material and tolerances, you can cut through significant stacks simultaneously to save time, and with the correct settings and setup you get very little splashback or other wetting.

Since the 60,000+ PSI stream is coming out of the nozzle at something like mach 2, the water is travelling too fast to make the edge wet!

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This is really interesting since waterjet often doesn't work well for non-rigid materials. Do you have to add a backer to keep the fabric stiff/in place or are you able to just rely on the thickness of a stack to keep it properly placed and non-moving?

For floppy materials we use a few approaches: first, instead of putting the material on the standard "metal slat" bed, we use a product called Rhino Board, which is essentially a whole bunch of plastic straws glued together into a rigid mat. It provides more granular support. For materials still needing more support, we put a sacrificial board (either OSB or plastic sheeting) underneath. And for materials that we can't glue down, or are even more problematic, we also put a sacrificial sheet on top.

Interesting! So you have a site I can see?

A competitor to me (offering laser services) has started offering water-cut plywood, which boggled my mind - I would have expected that to be a terrible idea!

Sure - we're a startup (MODICA Microindustries) working on a related problem (modular manufacturing equipment), and we spun up a subsidiary (Harbor Island Waterjet) offering waterjet cutting services as a job shop since we had excess capacity on our three machines.

There are pros and cons to waterjet cutting but for what it's worth, it can cut virtually anything. There are a lot of techniques for reducing splashback and other wetting/soiling from the tank. We cut wood fairly often. Some people like how laser singes the edges better, but to each their own!

Hey, thanks for getting back to me - I realised this morning I should've just checked your profile, which I did!

I'm very impressed with what you're doing - particularly as I actually had a similar idea a couple of years back, rooted in a plan to perhaps move country (within EU) and so was wondering how I'd a) move my equipment and b) set up shop when there. That sort of spawned a lot of thought about modular container-based systems, and how I'd fit various sizes and types of CNC machines in them. Then I wondered about the use of on-site CNC services for large construction developments - I could imagine the benefit of having a few accurate machining shops in containers that can quickly turn around finished interior elements straight from site measurements, etc.

As we know though, an idea's worth precisely nowt if unrealised, so I'm super-glad to see that someone has!

Best of luck to you!

Here's a datasheet for an industrial fabric cutter:

http://www.ruk-tech.com/uploads/137f9456.pdf

OT: Im very interested in learning more about modica. Would it be ok to email you?

Sure thing! Looking forward to hearing from you.

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