Prestige on cutting edge of technology.

• Position: CORPORATE PROFILE - Prestige Glass International - Integrated Flying Bridge waterjet cutter - Company Profile

Water is a remarkable substance for its ability to sustain life and to radically alter landscapes over thousands of years or even in a few moments.

Water and sand at high pressure are now also being used as a tool to open new product and service opportunities and alter the direction for Elliot Lake's Prestige Glass International.

Prestige Glass International is a maker of glass and crystal products, including awards for the American Hockey League, the Canadian Country Music Awards and many of the Fortune 500 companies.

"We're the largest manufacturer of glass and crystal awards in the country," says Robert Jackson, president of Prestige Glass International. "A lot of companies are decorators. They buy someone else's product and may decorate it with a company's logo. We actually manufacture products. We're one of the top two or three companies in the industry in North America."

What has Jackson excited about Prestige's future is the recent purchase of an Integrated Flying Bridge waterjet cutter. For an investment of over $200,000, the company acquired the machine last August to help in its core business of cutting out glass shapes. Financing for the technology was provided by the Sault Ste. Marie branch of the Business Development Bank of Canada.

It soon became readily apparent that it could have many other uses for the company to start accessing the contracting-out market, Jackson says.

He describes the machine as being similar to many other computer printers or plotters with a writing head that works with water pressure instead of ink. The device relies on precision computer control and an extremely intense and focused jet of water and sand to make precision cuts of any material from glass to granite to steel over a piece of material as large as 40 inches by 40 inches.

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The water and sand slurry travels out of a pencil-thin nozzle at 60,000 pounds per square inch (PSI) and at Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound.

"It can cut whatever shape you can generate on a CAD (Computer Assisted Design) system," says Jackson.

"For my own business, it's great. It helps me cut out shapes of glass a lot faster than I used to. This could also work for Northern Ontario machine shops, mining companies, mills, companies that even have their own machine shop. We can do some low-cost prototype cutting of any material without applying heat to it."

This is an important consideration, he says, because heat can change the molecular...