Bamboo Dining Table and Benches

Step 5 Cut parts on the waterjet.

You could use old school joinery techniques and cut all these parts the old fashioned way (table saw, chisel, cross cut saw), but as I had the opportunity to, I tested using an OMAX waterjet for the parts.

I created a custom material in the OMAX library called BAMBOO with a hardness setting of 500 and cut the parts on a quality of 3. I used a longer than standard lead-in to minimise splitting of the ply.

Other cool tricks while cutting wood on this machine:

lower the water tank level so the ply isn't soaking in the water during the cut.

constantly force a jet of compressed air around the parts during the cut to prevent water soaking into the top of the plywood. This also blows away any garnet or discolored water that can discolor the parts.

in preference in future I would use plastic supports in the tank instead of the steel ones because when the jet was cutting over the steel the backwash was a discoloring liquid.

I took care to align the parts in the layout program to align the wood grain with the parts where i wanted it.

Comments

[BAMBOOBIKER]

Seriously?  A waterjet for wood jointery?  THAT IS SOOOOOO CHEATING!  But what a GREAT IDEA!