Waterjet Cutting - Rocky Mountain Cutting LLC

Waterjet Machine Operator

I had an entry level engineering position at a small business in which I operated a CNC waterjet machine. My duties involved assembling CAD files, quoting purchase orders, pathing cut files, and cutting sheets of materials. I also created a few 3D CAD models of my own.

This image is an example of a part order that was requested to be designed and cut by me. Most of our POs had CAD files that had already been created, but this one was a fun little project for me to test my 3D modeling skills. You can see that this person probably made their design in a very basic sketching software, and provided me with some (but not all) of the dimensions needed for me to model it in Solidworks. I marked some of the additional measurements that I would need, and went to work.

Here is the final model I created in Solidworks for the client.

Another 3D model I made was for clamps to be used on the waterjet. Every time we cut a sheet of any material, it had to be tightly secured to the slats to reduce any vibrations as it was being cut.

Here is an example of a sheet of metal in which I cut 60 parts out of. A huge part of my job was receiving a CAD file then "nesting" and "pathing" it into a new file for the waterjet to cut. Nesting is the process of selecting what parts were going to be cut, and how many of each part, then having software determine the most effective way to pack all of these parts into one sheet of material. Pathing is the process of telling the waterjet what order to make all of its cuts in, so that it takes the least amount of time possible to cut the sheet of material - telling it what path to take. The pieces in this example also had to be "tabbed". This means I had to go through to all 60 pieces and add a tiny notch which prohibits them from being cut all the way out, hence why they are all still attached to this sheet. Parts smaller than a few inches would be at risk of falling through the slats and into the waterjet pool.

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