The 4-Person Cedar Creek Waterjet Shop Cutting to Mil-Spec for Austin’s Tech Stack

On a 7,500-square-foot slab off Highway 71 in Cedar Creek — thirty minutes east of downtown Austin — a family-owned machine shop called Aqua Jet, Inc. is quietly cutting to tolerances tighter than most of Austin’s bigger names will admit they need.

The shop is run by president Raleigh Tirion, a Texas Tech graduate, with son Nicholas Tirion on the manufacturing engineering side. Public business records estimate Aqua Jet at around four full-time employees and roughly $6 million in annual revenue — numbers that make it one of the smaller entries on the Austin Business Journal’s current manufacturing list, but also one of the most technically specialized.

What Aqua Jet actually does

The core of the business is high-pressure waterjet cutting — a pressurized stream of water, often mixed with garnet abrasive, strong enough to slice through hardened steel, titanium, ceramic, glass, or carbon-fiber composite without heat distortion. Aqua Jet pairs that with CNC-automated routing for plastics, foams, and rubber, plus a specialty in custom aluminum and copper busbar fabrication for electrical applications.

Listed tolerances are the kind of spec normally associated with aerospace suppliers: ±0.002 inches true position within a 24" × 24" area, ±0.005 inches across an entire cut, and 0.001-inch repeatability. Quality operations are described on the company’s own site as compliant with MIL-S-45208, the legacy military-grade inspection standard.

Job sizing is unusually flexible for a shop this small: single prototypes to one-million-piece production runs, with routine turnaround inside 48 hours when material is on hand. Parts as small as 0.5" diameter up to 50" × 100" fit the bed. There’s no tooling required — jobs come in as DXF, HPGL, DDES, or G&M Code files, and the machine takes it from there.

Why a Cedar Creek shop matters to Austin tech

Aqua Jet sits inside the outer ring of what has become an increasingly dense Austin manufacturing supply chain. The shop is 30 minutes from Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas on the east side of Travis County, and roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s Bastrop County operations center where Starlink hardware is produced. Robotics shops like Apptronik in North Austin, Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, and the Samsung fab campus in Taylor all sit within the same hour’s drive radius.

Small precision cut-and-fab shops like Aqua Jet are the kind of supplier that almost never makes a press release, but without which prototype iteration at companies that size would drag by weeks. A waterjet shop that can hit mil-spec tolerances on a 48-hour turn is a load-bearing piece of the regional manufacturing stack, even if its name doesn’t crack a single marketing slide at the Fortune 500 level.

The bigger picture

Cedar Creek itself is roughly half an hour east of central Austin, straddling Bastrop and Travis counties along Highway 71. The corridor has quietly absorbed a cluster of specialty industrial operations — water filtration, aerospace sub-assembly, custom fabrication — in parallel with the much-publicized arrival of Musk-operated facilities to its north and south. Aqua Jet is a clean example of the part of that growth story that doesn’t get a ribbon cutting.

Aqua Jet, Inc. did not respond to a request for comment before publication.