Leigh Plymale wrote: > ... With that in mind, Mark L. didn't you have your panel water jet > cut? This should be a very cool process. How 'bout it?
Yes, I had my panel waterjet cut. Details are at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/kpanel.html . Waterjet cutting is great for aluminum because it doesn't heat up the material and make it "grow". If you laser cut aluminum, it will grow during the cutting process, a LOT of the heat is dissipated throughout the sheet (so it takes more heat than you would think), and when it cools, it won't be the exact dimension that you were hoping for, since the holes were cut into a "bigger" sheet. Waterjet cutting works for steel, but it takes about three times longer to cut steel than aluminum, so it's more economically sensible to laser cut steel, and waterjet cut aluminum. Our local EAA chapter had a meeting a couple of years ago at the establishment where the BD-4 kits are now being made. They told us that they were laser cutting their aluminum panels. I asked "isn't that like trying to hit a moving target?". They confided that it had been a real challenge, but after adjusting the drawings, trial and error, etc, they finally had it worked out. I'll bet they're waterjet cutting them by now though! I'm not an industrial cutting expert, but I've had a significant hand in designing and buiding two different prototype aircraft loaders, made almost entirely of waterjet cut parts, and more recently I was the lead engineer in a 2-year project in which we took an off-the-shelf industrial-strength waterjet cutter and made it "portable" for the purpose of bomb device intervention. See http://www.tbe.com/products/watersabre/ for a brief outline of the thing. Part of designing and testing was to actually cut through various thicknesses of different materials to establish performance baselines. I'm one of those rare people that enjoys what I do at work... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL mailto:langf...@hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mylist.net/private/krnet/attachments/20030409/14415c98/attachment.htm
