Cutting-edge Fairfield Firm Makes Floors into Works of Art

By ERIK GABLE

Ledger assistant news editor

1 2 3

---

Continued from

"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.

---