Above: Dan Chatterton, CEO of Jacquet Midwest, with the Jet Edge X-5 5-axis waterjet.

Dual-head 5-axis waterjet helps Jacquet Midwest expand capabilities and earn more business

November 2016 - There are myriad ways to cut metal. Plasma cutters, saws, lasers and waterjets all perform the function of dividing a sheet of material into parts. Each method has its own set of benefits, and consulting with an experienced processor can help ensure parts meet quality specifications.

Jacquet Midwest, Racine, Wisconsin, a subsidiary of Jacquet Metals, Lyon Saint Priest, France, is part of a global network of service centers that distribute stainless steel and nickel alloys. Jacquet stocks 19 stainless and nickel grades in a range of sizes and thicknesses for OEMs, fabricators and machine shops that support the oil and gas, power generation, pollution control systems, and water purification industries.  

The waterjet features dual 5-axis cutting heads to double productivity.

“With 13 waterjet machines within the Jacquet USA group, coupled with our large inventory of stainless and nickel alloy plate, we have the knowledge to work intimately with all our customers to pinpoint their exact cutting needs to reduce their costs and process steps in order to get product into their hands quicker and closer to a completed part,” says Dan Chatterton, CEO of Jacquet Midwest.

“Depending on the specifics of their completed part, we can advise if plasma cutting or waterjet cutting best suits their needs. Tolerance, post processing and edge quality are all factors that go into this decision,” he says. 

Beyond straight lines

Before the summer of 2015, Jacquet was offering customers “straight-line vertical [waterjet] cutting of stainless steel and nickel alloy plate,” which generated “an excellent offering of waterjet-cut parts for our customers,” Chatterton says. 

However, “through discussion with our customers [we found] that many of our parts were going to additional post processing” after shipment, he says. Jacquet discussed these needs with waterjet designer and manufacturer Jet Edge Inc., St. Michael, Minnesota, “and discovered they had developed a cutting head that could articulate during the linear cutting path.”

Scott Wirtanen, regional manager of Jet Edge’s Boston office, says that more service centers are offering customers additional processing services like beveling and chamfering, “in an effort to keep customers captive and increase their customer base.” These services help customers save time by “eliminating secondary operations normally performed by the customers themselves or another shop.” 

The ball-screw-driven waterjet system has repeatability of +/- 0.001 inch.

To further broaden its waterjet cutting capabilities, Jacquet Midwest chose to install its third Jet Edge machine, a dual-head 5-axis Edge X-5. The cutting system gives the company the ability to provide beveling, chamfering and cutting of precise parts that do not need additional machining and meet tight tolerance requirements from “the top edge to the bottom edge of the part,” says Chatterton.

Jacquet Midwest will also use the Edge X-5 to process parts for Jacquet’s four other U.S. locations—Pottstown, Pennsylvania; Carson, California; Pineville, North Carolina; and Houston. 

The Edge X-5 is powered by a 60,000-psi iP60-100 intensifier pump and is capable of +/- 0.001-inch repeatability. The system also has submerged or above-water cutting capabilities as well as a proprietary plate-mapping feature for precise nozzle-to-plate standoff. Its dual 5-axis cutting heads are capable of cutting precise, three-dimensional parts, including bevels up to 50 degrees.

Saving time

According to Chatterton, the parent company chose to equip the waterjet systems at its U.S. service centers with tables that can handle the large plate sizes “that we buy mill direct, allowing us to be more efficient with our cuts.” In addition, the large tables mean that customers can “design and produce larger, one-piece constructed parts,” he explains.

Above: Dan Chatterton (left) and CAD engineer Ian Mykytka inspect a part. Below: This part demonstrates the chamfering and beveling capabilities of the waterjet system.

Jacquet Midwest’s newest machine features a 21-foot-by-13-foot work envelope, which makes it possible for the company to process 8-foot-by-20-foot and 10-foot-by-20-foot plates. The large table capacity also allows “Jacquet to load the table with multiple plates of the same thickness for longer, multiple-piece cuts,” says Chatterton “All Jacquet’s waterjets are equipped with lights-out cutting, allowing each machine to cut up to 66 hours uninterrupted and unmanned. This takes advantage of overnight and weekend hours that otherwise would be wasted as downtime and enables parts to get to the customer sooner than our competition.”

Adding the dual 5-axis heads to the large tables provides additional efficiencies. Jacquet can now double its production by cutting two similar parts simultaneously, says Chatterton. Because Jacquet Midwest is experienced with the waterjet cutting process, adding a “second cutting head really does not require additional training, rather simply an understanding of the spacing between heads when nesting,” Wirtanen adds.

Since Jacquet has run the machine, the Edge X-5 has helped the company to cut complex parts and obtain additional work from current customers. Chatterton cites an example of a 5-axis waterjet-cut blank the company developed and produced for a customer “that had a scalloped edge along one side of the part. The scalloped edge on this part had a beveled edge that had a changing angle throughout the linear path. This allowed the blank to be rolled into a cylinder and be perfectly fitted onto a tank vessel for welding.”

Jacquet is a longtime Jet Edge customer. All 13 of its waterjet-cutting machines were manufactured by the company, and this ongoing collaboration benefits everyone up and down the supply chain. 

“A customer like Jacquet provides in-depth and hands-on experience in the field from a high-production shop,” Wirtanen says. “This production feedback on engineered solutions is critical to ensuring proper performance under the toughest scenarios.” MM