Through some extremely innovative design and state-of-the-art technology, Wilfley has recently developed a new piece of machinery that provides six axis water jet cutting capability. What does someone do with a piece of machinery like this? The opportunities are pretty much limitless.
In the past, when a pumping application required an impeller with a minimum diameter trim, a machinist would have to manually remove a large amount of material on a lathe. This had always been a painstakingly slow and labor intensive process, especially when upwards of four inches needed to be removed from the overall diameter. This is a situation where the new water jet truly shines. Instead of slowly removing the material one chip at a time, the water jet can cut into the impeller and remove the excess material as one piece. This drastically reduces the amount of time that it previously took.
The image below shows the off cut of a very large WCD4™ impeller that needed to be trimmed down from 16” to 12.5”. It would have previously taken at least sixteen hours to machine off this much material. But even an impeller of this size and hardness was no match for the new water jet. It took less than one hour to achieve the same results.
That is an incredible amount of time saved. One can only imagine all of the other possibilities that our forward thinking manufacturing team will dream up for this technology. The innovative pioneering spirit is definitely still thriving here at Wilfley. I wonder what’s next…
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