10-23/24-24

Today Layth and I went down to the floor and completed day 1 of 2 of the waterjet. 

We worked with Tera who has been a waterjet operator for about 6 years. We started off with some don'ts, as in "don't put your hand under the suction" and "don't lean on the X-axis component because even just a little bit of pressure can scrap your part."

For the first 45 minutes or so we watched Tera run a part she had put in that morning but the sand container on the machine kept getting water in it, it was on the edge of the part doing some of the last pieces and that's where it usually starts doing that.

During those 45 minutes we looked at the sand bin, peeled plastic off of our aluminum sheets we'd cut and learned some basics about the waterjet.

After the 45 minutes we unloaded the previous part and put it out of the way to dry, then we loaded our first part! Before doing anything else we took our Z-axis up three inches just to be sure it wouldn't hit any of the weights that were placed on our part. I set the X-axis to zero. The way to do it is by using the up and down arrows on the keyboard and taking the pin to make sure it fits and can move freely between the moving component and the base point.

While our part was going we kept watch to make sure the cutter wouldn't hit any of the weights while making cuts. Tera showed us around her area more and told us about her supervisor and our part was done. We moved the cutter on the Y-axis about 70 inches so it wouldn't interfere with us getting the 18x60in part out. While taking the part out we sprayed off the excess sand and put it up to dry, while it was drying I loaded the next sheet, once it was in the water I used a suction cup to position it in a set corner to be sure its straight, then I put the weights on it and brought the cutter home, I checked to make sure the home was still correct and started water jetting. 

While the part was being run Tera taught me how to ream holes. She has two reaming machines in her station that we used, we started with the small holes that were about - so we used a - pin, when we moved onto the bigger holes that were - we used - pin. I descended the cutter very slowly into the hole as to not damage the part in anyway, after making my way through the hole I slowly brought the cutter back into its neutral position, turned the machine off and repeated that process for the rest of the holes and rest of the parts.

After reaming the first part we took it over to dimensional inspection, after checking at least 30% of it beforehand, we brought the part over to Shawn, he did our first part check and said we're in good shape.

While our fourth part was going we loaded 2 55lb sand bags into the sand hopper where the machine gets its sand from.

Day 2. first we moved the z axis up 3, moved the cutter 26 inches right, loaded a new part, clamp extra piece of material to aluminum sheet, brought the cutter back to 0, then we went and got a first part check, got back and took plastic off of another aluminum part, then went over to deburr, where we used the whirrly tool to deburr the inside of the holes in the part, then we used a 90 to get the tabs off the edges of the part and a DA if material is clad, (which ours was), use 220 and 100 sandpaper to sand the faces of the part, then we used an inline to finish the edges of the part off, after completing the deburr job, I clocked out out of it and started reaming holes.