Water Dragon

Now this is a cool little knick knack…

A few years back we were visiting some friends in Washington state. We ended up staying with a guy who worked at OMAX. This small company in Kent, WA manufactures abrasive water jet machines. These devices use a tiny jet of water pressurized to 40,000 PSI and mixed with garnet dust to cut through almost anything.

I actually got to go play with one of the machines at their shop. You just input a drawing into the computer attached to the table, and it does the rest. This little piece (about 4" long) was cut from .5 inch aluminum in about 13 minutes.

I should point out that the scratches on the surface are due to problems with the prototype machine we were using. A production machine wouldn’t touch the surface at all.