Creative Edge Master Shop - Waterjet

Cutting-edge Fairfield Firm Makes Floors into Works of Art

CREATIVE EDGE: Company hones waterjet technology

Fairfield Ledger - Friday, August 27, 2004

By ERIK GABLE

Ledger assistant news editor

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"Our programmers make drawings so that our machines can cut them," said Aalto. Sometimes this involves scanning a drawing into the computer and carefully tracing over it, creating lines that are defined by pieces of code — numbers on a mathematical coordinate system.

"It's actually quite a time-consuming process," Aalto said.

The AutoCAD drawing is sent back to the customer for final approval, and then the people who work on the factory floor can load the appropriate materials — pol­ished as smooth as a sheet of glass — onto the machines and begin cut­ting.

Cutting stone with a waterjet, Aalto said, is "quite a unique process." He added there's no other way to do the kind of work Creative Edge does. During the Renaissance, artisans would some­times carve very simple designs out of sheets of stone, enough to cover perhaps a table — but the process was so laborious that only a king could afford the cost of making that table.

Waterjets operate using a mixture of water and sand — but not any ordinary sand. This is garnet sand, which is extremely fine, extremely hard — and also extremely expen­sive.

"It has to be garnet, because what else is hard enough to cut any­thing?" Aalto said. "The only thing it won't cut is diamond. Everything else, it'll cut."

The garnet sand is one of Creative Edge's largest expenses.

The mixture of water and sand shoots in a thin stream out of a spe­cially designed, high-tech nozzle. The pressure is so great — 55,000 pounds per square inch — that the nozzles wear out after a few hun­dred hours of use. The sand and water comes slicing out of the noz­zle at twice the speed of sound.

"That's enough pressure to cut through 10 or 12 inches of titani­um," Aalto said.

Creative Edge not only uses waterjet technology, it has played a role in developing the technology.

"Waterjet was in its infancy 15 years ago," said Aalto. "It was archaic, it was slow and it was expensive."

But Creative Edge has been working to push waterjet technolo­gy forward, even doing much of the research and development work for one of the major waterjet manufac­turers.

 "We didn't invent the technolo­gy. I'm not saying that," Aalto said. "But we've learned how to tweak it to do work in a cost-effec­tive way."

Sawyer said Creative Edge's work isn't always clean, but it's fun.

COLORED RENDITION — Catherine Aalto, wife of Creative Edge president Harri Aalto, colors in a drawing of a design that eventually will be carved in stone using Creative Edge's waterjets. The draw­ing, done with colored pencils that match the colors of stone avail­able, will be sent to the customer for approval.

PROGRAMMING — Computer programmer Dennis Greenlee demonstrates the process of preparing a design in AutoCAD. The design has to be computer­ized, with lines represented using mathematical coordinates, so it can be read by the waterjet machines on the factory floor. Although there are other compa­nies doing waterjet work, Creative Edge's employees have the knowledge and exper­tise to provide start-to-finish ser­vice — from design to manufacturing to installation.


When businesspeople come to Fairfield to tour the plant, Sawyer said, he warns them that "this is not a Bob Vila kind of company." They'd rather get the work done than present a shiny facade for visi­tors — who by the time they're done with the tour, Sawyer said, are dirty and enjoying themselves.

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