Episode 6: How the Water Jet Became the Industry Standard for Cutting Internal HVAC Insulation

Hello everyone, I’m John Welty and welcome to Shop Talk with Mestek Machinery. In today’s podcast I’m joined by David Daw and Mike Bailey. And we get into a discussion about how the water jet for internal HVAC installation cutting came to be and how it became the standard in the industry that everyone else has tried to copy ever since. Thanks again for joining us.

Mike, do you want to kick that off?

Well, I’ll take this here. One of my responsibilities over the years with the Met-Coil Group was running the… Actually I think this was before Mestek took it over. It was running the trade shows that we do, the big annual trade show for Iowa Precision and Lockformer. And Gary Dickinson who was one of our head guys of our computerized side of the industry called me at the last minute. He said, “Make space for this new table that we have.” I said, “Okay, Gary. What is it?” He said, “It’s a water jet.” I said, “Gary, what is a water jet?” He says, “It cuts insulation.” I go, “Really?” I said, “Okay.” And so came the first water jet to a show. And I don’t remember exactly what year it was, but I’m saying 2000 give or take?

It was 2001 in Atlanta.

That’s it, here’s my guy. He’s got a good story about this for you.

I was the distributor at the time within the [Handy 00:01:40] Company and we had sold Lockformer and IO Precision, and pretty much all the duct fabrication equipment tools out there. But we’re always starring as an account rep at Handy to have something new to talk about. And I depended on Lockformer quite heavily for that. And I came down to the show early on Monday, before the show actually started and asked the same question. I said, “Ryan, what’s new?” And he said, “This water jet,” which was under a tarp at that point in time, I had not seen it. And I said, “What do you mean the water jet?” And he told me what it was, and he said it was for cutting internal insulation. He said “To compare, it’s like plasma to metal, but this is going to be water to insulation.” I said, “Okay.” I said, “That sounds fantastic. It’s neat. Something to talk about too.” And I said, “How much is going to be?” He said, “$100,000.” And I said, “Forget about it.” Nobody’s going to buy machine for $100,000.

A plasma machine’s what, $45,000?

No, at that time over $59,000 or $60,000.

Okay.

But again, I’m not going to purchase a machine for $100,000 to cut duct liner for God’s sakes. Right? Well, as I make the statement, there’s a contractor behind me that I called on in Georgia. And he says, “How soon can I get it?” And I look at him and I look at Ryan and Ryan says, “We got to show in Florida next week, you can have that one.” He said, “Tell me what to do to sign up.”

So I don’t know anything about this, right? I’m like, “Oh God.” Handy, my employer thought this guy was great, because I had to turn the order into Handy. And he’s like, “What is going on with this?” I said, “I don’t know. Don’t know, I’ll give it some time. I’ll find out.” And I went back to his factory about… I would go every week, but I gave it about three months and I finally went to the owner. I said, “Why?” And he said, “Mike, it’s simple.” He says, “First of all, you’re doing it manually. You’re cutting out insulation manually. The human mind cannot optimize, right? Now I’m optimizing with software, my cut patterns and I’m saving scrap. I had a 52 gallon drum a day of scrap at 32 cent per square foot. I’m down to a 52 gallon drum a week.” He’s a fabricator for others, so speed at 1,200 inches a minute meant a lot to him too.

But he said this. He said, “Mike, it takes all the thinking out of it. Even you could run this machine.” So I took that knowledge he gave me and we went to work. And I think, if I’m correct, we probably have over 400 systems just in the U.S. today, and that doesn’t count Australia and overseas. So again, there goes me, dead wrong from the get go because I basically said, “Nobody’s going to buy one for $100,000,” but it evolved the installation cutting. It cleaned everything up.

Cutting installation is still, that’s a tough gig. You got fiberglass. And if you’re not doing it correctly, it could be a health hazard, right?

Yeah.

There’s some remedial tools out there trying to cut these things with a RotoZip or a knife and things like that. And that’s crushing the fiberglass, and that fiberglass is spinning in the air. So we feel like that’s just harmful. The water jet just cleans the whole thing up. The machine cuts it 1200 minute. It takes all the thinking out of it for you. It optimizes for you. It saves you the scrap.

It actually does what we call a zero scrap factor, so there’s no scrap in between the parts. So beyond the plasma cutter in the mid ’80s, that was the next revolutionary tool. And a lot of folks would tell you this installation is going away. Because of my association as a distributor in selling installation for 10 years, I will tell you this, that these four manufacturers, Johns Manville, Owens Corning, Corning Pittsburgh, Certain Teed are four huge governing entities in the country pouring billions of dollars in the industry.

It’s not going away, but it’s getting better. That’s what’s happening. So in conjunction with that water jet, it’s made that process a lot faster and clear.

Yep. I can attest to this. I again, out of college went to work at Grit Mill, which was a company that manufactured products for attaching the insulation inside the sheet metal. I was told from day one, this product’s going to die. It’s going to die. Well, one of the reasons that room came was because the asbestos workers union didn’t like internal sound lining, because every time you put liner inside the duct, it eliminated their job from wrapping it on the outside. So it’s always a union situation.

And then there were certain environmental issues. I think that in 1970s, about 30 to 40% of all sheet metal was internally sound line. And it was going to go away and going to go away, going to go away. And I asked Eli, Eli Howard, I think recently I said, “What’s the percentage of internally sound line duct?” And he says, “About 30 to 40%.” So here it is 50 years later, I don’t see it going away.

So on the topic of the water jet, I’ve got an interesting story. I don’t remember what the year was, but the story that my dad and people around the shop have always told me is that he tried to build a water jet once upon a time way back in the day. And one of the guys in the shop was making fun of it. Not because of the price, but just that water couldn’t cut anything. And he may have been trying to use it to cut steel at the time. I don’t know what he was experimenting with, but the guy stuck his finger on it and said that thing can’t cut anything. And his whole hand swelled up.

Yeah.

Just instantly.

Surprised it didn’t cut it off.

Right? And my dad tore the whole thing apart, threw it away and said, “The world can’t handle this.” So obviously they have some of the safety issues around water jets. It’s extremely high pressure system is how this is cutting. And I’ve seen these out in the… I’ve never been involved with the controls of them or anything, but it looks like a beautiful cut that they do on this also.

It is. And it doesn’t care. It’s got up to four inch of material it can be.

I was going to say, you don’t even see the insulation being impacted by the water. It just slicing through it like, yeah. Like a hot knife through butter.

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s interesting.

And it cuts the gasket material. It cuts the elastic mirror, it cuts the fiberglass, cuts FSK duct board, unfaced board. It doesn’t care.

Yeah.

And it just rips right through it. But it has been a heck of a tool. I always know this as well. When you travel the country and you talk to these owners and they all have these nice shops or they’ll have coil lines, and things like that, this one particular machine is the one they’re the most proud of. They love the water jet. And I don’t care if it’s Hermans in Seattle or Jack Knox in Atlanta or it’s the [inaudible 00:08:14] in Boston. Every owner would tell you, that the slickest machine we’ve got is at water jet.

And not to tout Mestek Machinery, but it was Lockformer that developed this machine and it was, I think, years before competition caught up with us.

Yeah, it was about seven or eight years before somebody tried to. And that’s why we have patents, right? We got to protect ourselves and our research and development dollars, things like that. So it was some seven or eight years later before somebody entered that marketplace for that space.

So that water pressure system that those things use, is that a difficult thing for duct shops to maintain and that sort of stuff, or it must not be too big of a problem?

No, you can use the closed loop system called a chiller that recirculates the water and KMT is our pump manufacturer. And that’s a water cool pump, it’s not an air cool, which is even better because the shop’s hot, it’s going to be hot air. Shop’s cold, it’s going to be cold air. So we set these things right around 35,000 to 40,000 PSI, because the last thing you want to have is dumping and weakening on the inside of internal insulation, because it’s going inside of the duct work. So we’ve evolved with the product per se. It used to be Ingersoll Rand back in 2001 and became [crosstalk 00:09:31] and they’ve been our partner since 2001, a good partner too. So they’re from a service leg and just innovation and support. They’ve been very good.

So we were talking in a previous podcast about the BIM modeling and some of the downloading and that seamless integration of software to machine, from engineering, architecture all the way up and down the chain there. So I imagine the software that’s telling the plasma table or the laser table, the shape of the fitting to cut and nesting those parts together is also the same thing that’s driving the pattern that the water jet is cutting, so that they’re not having to continue to reinvent this information.

Very true. It is.

So it’s actually just splitting out to the individual machines in order to make all the parts together. I know the coil lines, even the blanks can be fed out to the coil line to produce those sheets.

Sure. It is the same. The same came optimization software, but we’re going to want to send plasma for metal and water for insulation. So yes, it is the same platform.

It’s got to be a huge savings there on, like you said, on waste.

It is. Yeah.

Yeah. And just shop efficiency.

Yeah.

Yep.

Good.

Interesting. Well, thank you for that. Looks like a good stopping point for today. On behalf of Mike Bailey and David Daw, I’m John Welty and thank you for joining us for Shop Talk with Mestek Machinery.