Custom Cutting Stone: Waterjet’ing Marble

Custom cutting stone, any type of stone, can be done at CNCROi.com including a whole host of other materials.

In this case, we’ll waterjet cut marble, custom cutting stone is the same process regardless of type, I just thought marble would be a great way to start exploring the options that CNCROi.com makes possible for anybody and everybody.

The nice thing about custom cutting stones like marble is how consistent the density is on the top quality kind, this means more consistent cutting results for the CNC waterjet.

So what are some applications where custom cutting stone can be used for? It’s endless:

• Custom corporate awards
• Custom wall art
• Custom outdoor ornaments and novelty items
• Custom industrial spacers and jigs
• Custom whatever you can think of… there are really endless applications for this.

Of course, if metal is more your pleasure, we can cut that out just as easily as this custom cutting stone demonstration.

For this custom cutting stone specifically, CNCROi.com used 3/4″ thick marble, it’s a good thickness for very sturdy and strong results and cost-effective both as raw slabs and cutting it out using the waterjet.

The first thing I cut out of this slab was my company name – this highlights a few things, first, that any stenciled font works great with any material, including stone and second, the precision that the machine offers to our customers with sharp inner corners and incredible repeatability for production runs.

Literally any font pretty much goes when it custom to custom cutting stone, so the next things I wanted to cut was an owl, this can be any shape, size or animal or plant or organism you can think of, the flexibility CNCROi.com offers you is that literally anything curved or blocky can e cut and shipped right to your door.

Unlike the CNCROi.com font, there is nothing straight in the marble owl, which is exactly what I wanted to demonstrate as these two elements pretty much represent any mix and match of possible vector lines our customers can come-up with on a 2D plane.

Engraving stone or rocks with whatever message you want at CNCROi.com is no problem, just got to make sure it’s more flat than rounded, of course, we can also cut slabs to be dead flat for the best results but something about natural stone and rock just screams unique.

As with the font though, custom cutting stone animals or any shapes requires the inner parts to be cut first to make sure nothing moves, followed by the outer outline, this maintains accuracy across the entire piece.

If you are not familiar with how to make stenciled fonts or shapes, CNCROi.com can help guide you along the process so that’s its fun and seamless but generally, you want to have at least two connections, or bridges, between supported materials to make sure things don’t fall out.

Custom cutting stone is really no different than anything else CNCROi.com cuts at the shop, the parameters change slightly but at the end of the day, whether we are cutting quarter inch stainless steel or 1/32″ polycarbonate, there really isn’t that much that truly changes between machines and design files.

One thing to keep in mind that’s obvious is that CNC waterjet cutting is wet and dirty, there is grit in the waterjet stream and as a result, that gets all over the piece both during production and after, but it’s easily cleaned-off.

A project I did a while back was engraving the rock on a rock – it was the perfect fit and I still have it on the wall here at CNCROi.com years later and still looks amazing.

The garnet is what provides the abrasive for the water to chew through the material below it, whether it’s custom cutting stone or anything else, there is no difference other than PSI, distance and speed to contend with.

After cutting out my website domain and an awesome owl, it was time to showcase ultimate repeatability when it comes to custom cutting stone, a simple grill.

It’s easy to hide things that aren’t precise or repeatable in random shapes because your eye will not pickup inconsistencies, I could have had a few quills on the owl misplaced and nobody would notice but with a grill, where alignment and spacing are critical, your eye will instantly pick out something that isn’t in the right place.

Of all the stone I’ve cut and engraved, my favorite has been this field stone, it was just so beautiful and when it got wet, it came to life… I returned it to the forest from which it came.

CNCROi.com can of course design and produce custom grills out of any material and size, but making a custom grill using marble is a first.

Whether the waterjet is cutting grills, owls or CNCROi.com, there is no difference in speed, they all cut at the same rate regardless of whether the lines go straight or curve but one thing that does affect production speed is piecing.

No matter the material, piercing is the slow process, for this custom cutting stone process, each time we make a new hole, the machine isn’t moving, it sits in one place, very similar to our plasma cutter, and makes the hole “through” the material and then it can start moving about cutting the rest of the hole.

This isn’t the first nor the last time we play with stone and rock at CNCROi.com, from cutting to engraving, we’ve got you covered!

If we didn’t apply piecing to our work, then there wouldn’t be enough momentum to cut out shapes properly as the abrasive would always be playing catch-up.

Regardless, everything cut amazing, the custom cutting stone proof of concept is looking fantastic and everything is as it should be.

Whatever you need custom cut, engraved or etched, contact CNCROi.com and we’ll do it for you in any material, size or shape.

I think the next thing we’ll cut at the shop using the waterjet is granite, got a few scrap slabs in the shop that need some work done to them to further showcase CNCROi.com‘s capabilities.