Nozzle Degradation

Overtime the Nozzle on your WAZER will gradually wear out.  Most of the time the way a nozzle fails is not instantaneous, so understanding how it wears will help you decide when it is time to replace the nozzle. 

Typical nozzle wear is gradual and can sometimes go unnoticed as the performance will slowly drop off over time. As the performance decreases, under the same cut quality setting, you will actually have poorer cut qualities coming out of the machine. Eventually there will come a point at which the coarse cut quality setting will generate a cut that has not only become extremely rough but has small connection points where it didn't fully cut through.

Throughout this performance degradation you can dial back your cut speed at the machine to compensate for it (if needed), or simply bias towards the next level of cut quality setting in Wam. However, if this coincides with approximately 300+ hours of cutting on your current nozzle or you are seeing those connection points on rough cuts, it is recommended that you replace the nozzle in order to return the performance of the machine. The reason to do this at this point is to save on your overall cutting cost by increasing the performance. If you just continually slow down the machine to compensate for the degradation in performance your cuts will gradually be costing you more and more as a result of the inherently longer cuts.

One of the things that may be confusing during this performance degradation is the performance drop off is not the same across thicknesses and materials. You can expect that the more difficult the material is to cut(ie. harder and thicker), the more noticeable the cut quality drop off. The reason we bring this up is because a nozzle near the end of life (300 hours) in 6061 Aluminum will have a 5% reduction for 1/16" (1.5mm) and a 20% reduction for 1/2"(12mm) sheet.