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

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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"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."