Cool thing of the day

I don’t know why this hasn’t been all over the internet, but it’s huge and in my opinion shows great promise and is a boon for the future of personal fabrication.

The MEAM waterjet was a Mechanical Engineering senior design class (not unlike our 2.009 but 2 semesters) which produced a functional abrasive waterjet cutter for under $10,000. No matter how proof-of-concept it is, waterjetting for under $10,000.

Maybe I’m just so into waterjetting that only I find this amazing. Maybe I’m just super excited that there exists a potential for DIY waterjets as much as there is for DIY 3d printers and DIY laser cutters. Metal is the last frontier of these hobby class fabrication devices. Nothing can really do metal yet.

Or maybe I’m just miffed that my own bad waterjetting ideas haven’t made it beyond chicken scratch status on sheets of crusty paper.

Yet.

Here’s the team’s whitepaper on the machine’s design process. There’s no videos of the thing, nor really any good pictures. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a documentation fail!

2 thoughts on “Cool thing of the day”

  1. Well, I do tend to have my own definition of what constitutes a “game-changing” price change in a technology’s cost – which generally results in little more than copious amusement on my part when hobby CNC or 3D printing machines priced around $1500 are advertised as astonishingly cheap (to be clear, $400-500 is a very different story…) considering that is of interest only to a relatively thin (and fairly rich) layer of “early adopters” and people who otherwise have access to it without having to pay its cost (hey, I much appreciate having access to the small ~$4000 semi-industrial CNC-retrofitted mill at work, but I have no illusions whatsoever of it having any impact on my (lack of) ability to privately acquire one).

    But in all fairness, I do understand and acknowledge the importance of substantially reducing the cost of such a technology, even if the result achieved will not make an iota of difference for average people who would be interested in the technology on a hobby level. And yeah, definitely “pics or it didn’t happen”… :)

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