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For nearly twenty years Altimate Medical has been making Easystand®; standing technology that improves the quality of life for kids and adults who use wheel chairs world-wide.
The engineering team at Altimate Medical was in need of a rapid, low-cost method to proto type parts and discovered that waterjet lends itself very well to testing extrudable parts prior to tooling up. It is often the case, when developing new assemblies, that an actual physical part is needed; a proto type part that will fit on the machine to test the concept and fine tune the overall assembly. Each time an adjustment is made to the over all assembly another set of proto type parts needs to be made, but to build a mold each time there is an adjustment to a proto type part becomes very expensive.
For this particular project waterjet seemed to be a better option than laser cutting or plasma cutting. The material blank was one inch thick and the part design included tight inside radius and small holes. The variables that needed to be tested included: dimensions of the blank, material type of the blank and the edge quality of the part.
After talking with the folks at JIT Companies we knew we had found a waterjet operator that understood the final application and the concepts that we wanted to test. A team from Altimate Medical went to visit the JIT facility so our design engineers could understand the capabilities of the waterjet and learn how it could be beneficial to our particular project. JIT was a trustworthy partner in deducing what was critical to our machine and how the cutting variables would affect the overall price. We were confident in our design prior to tooling up.
“The waterjet cut parts do a great job of representing the parts as they would be extruded and it has become a valuable tool for us.”
- Mike Lokken
Altimate Medical
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