How a waterjet helps to bring characters to life for Nashville designer

The machine shop at Animax Designs, Nashville, Tenn., uses its OMAX Maxiem 1530 waterjet cutting machine to turn around cutting jobs to keep projects on schedule. Images: Animax Designs

James Hudak is a machine shop manager. He works with six other individuals, two of whom are certified welders. The shop has a CNC vertical machining center, some manual mills, and a CNC router. It added a new waterjet cutting machine that has brought a new dynamic to the shop’s capabilities. The shop works on prototypes one day and has to knock out multiples of parts the next day. All in all, Hudak’s world sounds like life in any other shop.

Except that Hudak and his co-workers bring amazing characters to life, such as giant dinosaurs.

And it doesn’t end there. He’s also helped to animate cartoon figures, monsters, and other mythical creatures during his nine years with Animax Designs Inc., Nashville, Tenn. Officially, the company, founded in 1989, is dedicated to creating “extraordinary three-dimensional characters with artistic integrity and cutting-edge technology,” per the website. Unofficially, the company is a collection of artists and automation experts, engineers and puppeteers, tailors and toolmakers, and modelers and metalworkers—all charged with bringing a customer’s character, also known as intellectual property, to life.

Hudak studied industrial design for the entertainment industry while in college in the mid-2000s. He also liked to work with his hands, tinkering on things and working with motors, as a youngster. During college he even worked in a shop that fabricated floating dock systems for boats and personal watercraft. With all that in mind, he knew that he couldn’t walk into a typical job shop and be productive right off the bat, but he also knew that a machinist with a production background really wouldn’t find his footing at Animax Designs for at least a year. It takes time to understand the manufacturing realities of producing animatronic characters instead of lifeless metal components.

“I know how job shops work. I understand it,” Hudak said. “But a job shop guy couldn’t just walk in here today and say, ‘Oh yeah, man, I got this.’ It's definitely a strange mix of work we do here.”

How Fabricating Is Different Than in the Typical Shop

In a typical job shop, the blueprint often drives all fabricating activity on the floor. If the print meets the customer’s specifications and the fabricator follows it as described, all should be satisfied with the results.

Animax Designs also works with prints, but the end result has to be at the forefront of all manufacturing operations, according to Hudak.

“Context is very important in what we do. At the end of the day, whatever we make has to look like that intellectual property piece that we’ve signed up for,” he said. “So, if we’re doing a dinosaur, it has to look like that. Everything else is driven from that.”

As an example, Hudak described how the company’s engineers might design a mechanism that allows for some realistic movement, but if that system can’t be integrated into the character’s structure, then the cool engineering feat can’t be realized. The same holds for a welder’s work, say, on a dinosaur head, which needs to be smooth and rounded so that the exterior skin doesn’t get caught on sharp edges. Now, you can’t spell out those directions by referring to an ASTM standard, and that’s why the notes section of an Animax Designs production blueprint is so important. Hudak said some production-oriented shops wouldn’t be as comfortable with as many addendums to the print, but that’s life in a more creative environment.

The deadlines for these types of projects are as varied as the jobs employees are being asked to do. Hudak described a new attraction, which features the company’s handiwork, coming online at a major amusement park in March, a full three years after Animax Designs began work on it. In other instances, Hudak said, a project can be completed in two or three months.

Animax Designs has a 5- by 10-ft. table, which is large enough to accommodate a majority of the jobs coming through the shop.

“It’s more or less whatever the client wants, and we’ll look at the project and say, ‘Yeah, we can do that no matter what.’ Then we figure it out or we send it out to be worked on,” Hudak said.

While a deadline measured in months sounds like heaven, these types of deadlines are driven by scope of the project. The days can be hectic as the shop tries to wrap up a hot job and have it on a pallet for a mid-afternoon pickup for a customer. At Animax Designs, the pressure is to keep the project moving forward. Delays in one department have a domino effect, squeezing other departments’ timeframe to get their jobs done.

To help it become more responsive, the machine shop purchased and installed an OMAX Maxiem 1530 waterjet cutting machine from machine tool distributor Capital Machine Technologies. The waterjet was installed in April 2020.

The company knew that it wanted a waterjet when it moved into its current facility three years ago. The building, almost 90,000 sq. ft., is a former warehouse, so space wasn’t going to be an issue for the inclusion of a new machine tool. Company management made sure to install a drain and arrange for water access to the machine shop’s corner of the plant.

Hudak has called the waterjet a “game-changer” in being able to meet the requests of customers, both internally and externally.

“I always want to say ‘yes’ to people. If someone handed me a drawing, and I could spin around in a circle and hand them a part, I would do that every single time,” he said. “Now, that’s obviously not real, but the goal is always to be able to say ‘yes.’ You can’t always do that, unfortunately.

“But sometimes having the right tools is the difference between me saying, ‘Yeah, I can have that taken care of today’ or ‘Yeah, I can have that for you in a week.’ Just like in a lot of industries, that outsourcing costs us time and money.”

Hudak said that any outsourcing of sheet metal cutting called for a minimum lead time of a week. Of course, that’s if everything went according to schedule. When outsourcing takes place, an on-time scenario is always at risk.

Before installing the waterjet, the machine shop used its CNC router to cut some parts. It was time-consuming, and Hudak said that they were sometimes going through $150 in cutting tools a day.

Now the waterjet gives the shop the ability to turn around a cut part in a matter of minutes. “Aluminum on that thing is kind of a joke,” Hudak said. “It cuts through that material so quickly, it really spoils us.”

The manufacturing team also likes the waterjet’s flexibility when it comes to cutting different materials. They regularly cut aluminum, mild steel, and stainless steel, and have even recently cut some carbon fiber material.

Even though Animax Designs typically cuts metal below the water surface, which helps to reduce the noise of the cutting process, it is still able to cut much lighter plastic materials too. With the use of Barton waterjet bricks, which are made from a high-density polyethylene and have a laminated pattern that minimizes splashback and stands up to the waterjet abrasives, machine technicians can rest buoyant materials above the waterline and ensure they will stay in place during cutting. Hudak said that this has come in handy when cutting closed cell foam, which is used as the basis for many projects. Cutting the closed cell foam used to be done manually, and some of the jobs took days. Now it can be done in minutes.

How Fabricating Is Similar

This is the part of the story that will ring true to metal fabricators of all types. While Animax Designs has projects that last for months, the machine shop also has to deal with “pop-ups,” as Hudak called them. These are the unscheduled events that the manufacturing team has to react to quickly so that the projects remain on schedule.

What might one of these pop-ups be? Hudak gave the example of the assembly team recently needing to relocate a sensor on a character structure because the old location wasn’t delivering the right readings. The sensor needed to be in a better position, which required the manufacturing team to accommodate the shift of the sensor and wiring inside the metal structure. Being that the project was in assembly, it was close to being delivered, which meant there was no time to postpone the rework. “So, we have to stop what we’re doing and knock that out to keep things moving,” Hudak said.

Flexibility in the machine shop is also reflected in those who make up the manufacturing team. No one is a specialist. The goal is to make them “fabricators,” Hudak said.

The machine shop has two certified welders. One of them runs a lot of the CNC equipment, and the other is being trained to do the same. The cross-training allows Hudak to hand off a project with the directions of “Make this” instead of having to create a process chain: “Have a machinist make this part and then give it to the welder for assembly.” That keeps the department flexible enough to respond to jobs if someone is absent or engulfed in another project.

Hudak said he learned to run the company’s 5-axis machining center to produce structural foam shapes. “It’s the idea of being flexible and changing with the times—just keeping your skills up.”

One More Thing

Animax Designs’ machine shop has all of the hustle one sees in a manufacturing operation where each day is a brand-new adventure in making things, but the stresses associated with the buzz are unique. Motivation also might be a bit different, according to Hudak.

The people that touch a project develop an emotional attachment to it. While they aren’t connected to the production of living beings, they are responsible for giving inanimate characters life. Those in the machine shop and their colleagues are focused on making artistic visions real.

That goes beyond just working for a paycheck or getting parts out the door. In their manufacturing work, the folks at Animax Designs are unique characters in their own right.