Norck, a leading digital manufacturing company, provides extremely reliable, top quality, and fast sheet metal cutting services such as waterjet cutting for a wide range of industries including aerospace, defense, robotics,  industrial, automotive, electronics, energy, hardware, and consumer products. Our team of highly qualified engineers and cutting-edge facilities will provide you with quality products with the quickest turnaround time at a competitive price. Whether you have high volume production projects or rapid prototyping needs, Norck can manage it with the results better than expectations.

Click here to get a quote for your next sheet metal fabrication with waterjet cutting.

Let’s now give you some insight how Norck uses its waterjet cutting technologies.

Waterjet cutting is a process that uses high-pressure water, generally with abrasive particles, to cut through various materials such as metals, plastics, and stones. Abrasive particles are added to the water stream to increase its cutting force for hard materials. It is used in aerospace, naval, automotive, ceramics, and textile.

Waterjet cutting can cut tubes and bent sheet metal components to clean edges and add holes.

Waterjet cuts are perpendicular to the sheet surface and can't add draft or threads.

Waterjet cutting offers more advantages over the traditional cutting process:

•  More precision: Accuracy is around ±0.004in (±0.1mm), while in conventional methods, it is about 0.04in(±1mm)
•  Clean: Cuts with no burrs or double edges
•  Faster manufacturing: Since it is controlled via a computer

Even over laser cutting waterjet offers:

•  Cold cutting, the material will not be affected by heat
•   No pollution since it doesn't use cutting gases
•  Greater thickness can be cut using waterjet cutting than laser cutting

Using abrasive, waterjet cutting machines can cut through ferrous and non-ferrous rigid materials such as metals, ceramics, marbles, and tempered glass. And without any abrasive for materials such as plastics, fiberglass, and cardboard. Waterjet can cut through different thicknesses. It is used to cut simple or complex shapes with ease and an accuracy of 0.1mm, while traditional cutting processes' accuracy is about ±1mm. It is an efficient and low labor cost process.

The first step is to generate a vector file using graphic design software such as Illustrator or 3D modeling software such as Solidworks. Norck offers engineering services that will help you create this type of file. Next, we will generate a code for the Waterjet cutting machine using the vector file.

The water is pumped to the cutting head through an intensifier that increases the water pressure from 50 to 55,000 psi. Then the water is focused using a ruby or diamond into a mixing tube to add abrasive particles if needed. The mixture of water and abrasive is fired from the mixing tube with a high velocity of around 686m/s (1534mil/h).

The cutting head cuts material locally and is guided along the shape to be cut using the code generated from the vector file.

Sheet metal parts should follow specific design rules to be cut properly. And the vector file can have multiple shapes; in that case, arrange shapes to minimize scrap.

This method is called Nesting.

Nesting is placing the shapes inside a rectangle that stands for the sheet metal from which the nested shapes will be cut.

Shapes should be placed in a way that minimizes scrap and cutting time.

Norck, a leading manufacturing company driven by technology, high quality data and artificial intelligence, focuses on manufacturing excellent quality of sheet metal parts, custom parts and components, a wide range of 3D printed parts and moldings. It is a single source for a wide of range of companies around the world for their need of sheet metal fabrication, CNC machining, 3D printing, and molding. 

Besides its own production capacity, Norck’s ability access to a huge amount of manufacturing capacity of its top quality partners across Europe and the U.S allows it to provide its customers with low and high volume production, rapid prototyping and a wide range of manufacturing services from sheet metal fabrication to 3D printing.

Norck’s data-driven AI approach to manufacturing maximizes its overall product and service quality, while minimizing the overall cost of its parts and services. This leads to high quality products, better inventory programs for our customers worldwide, better visibility for supply chain management.

Norck’s team of manufacturing engineers, mechnical engineers, quality engineers, supply chain engineers, industrial designers, artificial intelligence engineers, data scientists, and software application developers work in a unique and coherent way to provide your company with high quality manufacturing parts and services, better design for manufacturability and all driven by data and artificial intelligence.

As a single source for all your manufacturing needs, Norck minimizes your overhead cost, diversifies your supply chain, improves your parts’ design for manufacturability, significantly improves the quality of services and parts you outsource, minimizes suppliers’ risks, improves your purchasing power, and provides the goods and services with a philosophy of just in time.