Just another average day of what can go wrong will. I started with something simple, and it was good. I straightened up the scrap pieces around the waterjet and it looked much better.

Then I decided to run the waterjet, but I must have been rushing myself too much. I put the workpiece on backwards and started cutting. Fortunately I realized the error before I lost too much raw material to restart the part in the right orientation.

On restart, the abrasive feed started acting up again, belching large blasts of abrasive out the top of the hopper. So, pause the cutting and bleed the feed line of air. Then restart. Amazingly, the point at which I stopped the first time was within a couple hundredths of an inch from being wrong. What luck (which didn't last). I setup the next panel that I needed to cut the identical pattern and zeroed the machine in for its next run.

Then I found out that I needed to send some material out to another lab for testing. So, I prepare the documentation, carefully pack the boxes, weigh them and put them on the PM's desk so he could review the paperwork before sending them out. Well, instead of reading the paperwork first, he jumped straight to the boxes and opened and unpacked them. He happily came back to me exclaiming that "hey, we got the leftover material back from the other lab". You can guess how the rest played out, ending with me (voluntarily) repacking the boxes.

When I got back to the waterjet, it turns out that the software decided to do its funny trick of dying, which destroyed my setup work. After several hours of IT work, we are going to see if its stable overnight before I fire it back up again. At least in the mean time, I got to do some strain gauging work to help out the testing efforts. Well, thats the day it been.