The life of a diamond
A while back we talked about the difference between waterjet cutting orifices in our post Diamond, ruby, or sapphire? On average, ruby and sapphire orifices typically last for about 40 cutting hours while a diamond will last for 1,000 hours. Again, that's the average.
Often we hear from customers who get many more hours than that. Those customers include Brian at Press Technology & Manufacturing in Ohio. Brian purchased a diamond orifice from Hypertherm's AccuStream brand in October of 2013, put it into his system and there it stayed until just this week.
In total the orifice was in his system for 18 1/2 months and 1,388 cutting hours! That's nearly 40 percent longer than average and more than double the 600 hours the diamond is warranted for.
Brian writes “The AccuStream diamond orifice fits snuggly in the DiaLine cutting head so there is no way to get out of line,” and “Compared to the Flow rubies that came with our machine, the AccuStream diamonds can really take a beating. We were only getting 25 to 30 cutting hours with the Flow rubies."
If you do the math and divide the average $20 cost of a ruby by the 30 hours of cutting Brian was getting you’ll see that the cost was 67 cents per cutting hour. His $400 diamond on the other hand cost him just 29 cents per cutting hour and that doesn't even include the time saved by not having to change out his orifice every 30 hours.
Have you ever tried cutting with a diamond orifice? What sort of life did you see?