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2 New Haas Machines and ???

aandabooks

Aluminum
Joined
Oct 24, 2009
Location
Illinois
Need some questions answered about 2 new Haas machines (Mini-Mill & VF-2) that I have being delivered on Thursday.

A little background: I'm a high school machine shop teacher and was a CNC machinist for 10 years, a couple years doing setup for another company and various other machining experience. I have a Haas TL-1 in the shop now and have been using that for 14 years. Have been teaching on a couple SWI Prototrak mills for 3-4 years. Don't run any coolant in the shop as of now but with new machines on the way questions arise.

These machines will not be in use continuously and will go days/weeks being dormant. For sure all summer since I don't teach in the summers.

What will be my best bet for using coolant in these machines? I don't have access to recycling/pumping/filtering like I have had at other places that I have worked in the past to keep up with coolant issues.
 
I recommend Hangsterfer's 5080; it's what I use for medical device prototype parts. I mix it with distilled water. Maintain the proper concentration and it doesn't get stinky, no rust problems, works great in all kinds of materials, and it's basically food grade (emulsified soybean oil) so I can just flush it down the drain if I want to drain the sump, which I'd recommend over the summers, though you might get away with not doing so. I've even splashed it in my eye (not intentionally), and it didn't even sting. You can get it by the five gallon bucket if a 55 gallon drum is too much.
 
Trim E206 is pretty resilient stuff. It's been around forever. Has a good track record for working well and not stinking.
 
The other thing that I am considering is just going with an add-on mister. I have been doing research on those and while there would be cleanout of the coolant tank occasionally it could be done with a shop-vac.
 
Since you have full enclosures, I'd stick with flood coolant. We run a Fogbuster single-nozzle mister on the open TM-1 at the local high school robotics shop. This requires babysitting to make sure the coolant is aimed right at the cutting zone and the tank does not run out in the middle of a cut. With one nozzle, the part often shadows the flow. We've clogged up and broken a lot of not-cheap carbide endmills because of these issues. In addition, despite the Fogbuster name, a lot of coolant gets in the shop air. When running enough flow to prevent clogging, coolant ends up on the floor.
 
Flood coolant all the way. I imagine the students will be running aluminum most of the time, with cheap cutters. That's a recipe for disaster with insufficient coolant (which is lubricant as much as coolant).
 
The machines in my shop sit idle for long periods - and so far I have no problems with qualichem xtreme cut 250c. (Which replaced hangsterfer's - which also worked fine but left brown goo on things.)

The quality of the water used in mixing, and the amount of muck left in the tank and not filtered out will likely be the biggest issues - so something like skimmer may help quite a bit.
 
Flood coolant all the way. I imagine the students will be running aluminum most of the time, with cheap cutters. That's a recipe for disaster with insufficient coolant (which is lubricant as much as coolant).
You got the part about cheap cutter right on. Budget only goes so far so carbide gets used very cautiously for specific work. Also slow feedrates and light cuts. I'm always telling them we have plenty of time and not running production.
 
The machines in my shop sit idle for long periods - and so far I have no problems with qualichem xtreme cut 250c. (Which replaced hangsterfer's - which also worked fine but left brown goo on things.)

The quality of the water used in mixing, and the amount of muck left in the tank and not filtered out will likely be the biggest issues - so something like skimmer may help quite a bit.
I just got a promo bucket of Qualichem 250C with my new machine. I asked for it based on PM feedback like Bryan's that I searched. I have not mixed up a batch yet, because the machine installation is incomplete. I have my fingers crossed that the 250C will last, or my wife will be rather upset. She has a sensitive nose.
 
You got the part about cheap cutter right on. Budget only goes so far so carbide gets used very cautiously for specific work. Also slow feedrates and light cuts. I'm always telling them we have plenty of time and not running production.
Look into Redline for cutters. They don't cost much more than steel in small to medium sizes, and run pretty well.
 
Qualichem is what I've used with great results in terms of staying fresh. Std. tap water is what they recommended and it's been pretty solid. The tapping leaves a bit to be desired though on small threads M4 and below.
 
+1 Trim
I've seen the original TrimSol product sit for 6+ months and not changed for years without any smell. We use other Trim products and have never experienced any smell/bio issues. You will need a simple skimmer to remove tramp oil. You'll save a lot of mills w flood coolant.
 
I guess I will be the black sheep and say say try running dry with air blast to clear chips. You can get away with a lot as long as you aren't running aggressively or doing deep slotting. You will have to put M00 in for adding tapping oil before tapping but I am sure most people have had to do that on tougher materials. Like you said you aren't running production or trying to break records. Without coolant you don't have to worry about it going rancid or leaving a scuzzy coolant film on every flat surface in the shop as the coolant settles out of the air.

Just inform your students that the speeds and feeds they are running are laughably slow for the real world but that is how you will be running in this class to save money on tooling.

Also try these tools:

I have been happy with them in a prototype shop and at $35 for a 5 pack of 1/4, 4 flute endmills you can risk cutting dry with them.
 
I guess I will be the black sheep and say say try running dry with air blast to clear chips. You can get away with a lot as long as you aren't running aggressively or doing deep slotting. You will have to put M00 in for adding tapping oil before tapping but I am sure most people have had to do that on tougher materials. Like you said you aren't running production or trying to break records. Without coolant you don't have to worry about it going rancid or leaving a scuzzy coolant film on every flat surface in the shop as the coolant settles out of the air.

Just inform your students that the speeds and feeds they are running are laughably slow for the real world but that is how you will be running in this class to save money on tooling.

Also try these tools:

I have been happy with them in a prototype shop and at $35 for a 5 pack of 1/4, 4 flute endmills you can risk cutting dry with them.

The biggest benefit of flood imo is the ease of cleaning the machine and reducing dust/chips in the air. I ran a VF2 with air blast for 4 months last year. When we finally fixed the flood coolant I was blown away by the quality of life improvement. I would NEVER go back.
 
surprised no one mentioned it yet but throw a couple of aquarium bubblers in your tanks to keep the o2 levels up, keeps anaerobic bacteria from forming
 
My coolant recommendation would be to use a "full synthetic," or other totally bio-hard coolant, to avoid ever having the sump go foul. You really can't have your coolant go foul in your situation. It's a tedious multi-step process to get the sump clean again, and it's probably just going to foul faster the next time. Sour or rotten smelling coolant will probably also scare students away from the industry.

You need to use RO water in your sumps or the minerals will build up over time and cause problems. These systems are not too expensive, and a common household four or five stage "under the sink" triple filter + RO system will suffice, although the bladder tank on those is usually only a couple of gallons, so building a system with a 14 or 20 gallon storage tank would allow you to fill multiple 5 gallon buckets back to back without waiting on the system, which is very slow to refill once drained. There are RO membranes with a 1:1 reject ratio, and those waste less water. There are systems with disposable twist on filters which require less care to swap filters when necessary, although you can go years without swapping filters on a shop RO system.

I used Syntilo 9918 (full synthetic) for many years and it is good as far as operator tolerability and unlimited sump life, but it is not the most lubricative for tapping, though the same might be said about other full synthetics. I'd usually add an M0 to my programs and apply straight coolant concentrate to the holes as a tap lube, which works fine and doesn't contaminate the sump. The rust prevention of 9918 was not perfect but probably on par with most other coolants.

Vises should be removed from the machine table every so often and cleaned underneath, if they are normally left on the table in your situation, maybe every month or two, and if brass / copper / aluminum are machined at the same time you really have to clean everything thoroughly after each project or job, or serious corrosion will occur. Plugging the center hole in the base of Kurt vises will help keep chips from packing under there and causing corrosion.

The sumps should be pumped out and the tanks cleaned occasionally, once per year maybe, or more frequently if brass / copper / aluminum are all machined in the same machine, but the same coolant can be reused to refill the tanks. Pumping the coolant into a 55 gallon drum and storing it there over the summer, if the machines go unused during that time, would prevent evaporation of the water and keep the humidity lower in the shop during the break.

I recommend Hangsterfer's 5080; it's what I use for medical device prototype parts. I mix it with distilled water. Maintain the proper concentration and it doesn't get stinky, no rust problems, works great in all kinds of materials, and it's basically food grade (emulsified soybean oil) so I can just flush it down the drain if I want to drain the sump, which I'd recommend over the summers, though you might get away with not doing so. I've even splashed it in my eye (not intentionally), and it didn't even sting. You can get it by the five gallon bucket if a 55 gallon drum is too much.
I took your advice and swapped my mill to Hangsterfer's 5080 just last week.... So far I am not impressed. This stuff smells strong and hits me like mustard gas. I cannot breath at all when I open the doors to my mill or it will choke me out, and this is without any "fog" being generated in my machining processes. The vapor just burns to breath, it's a dreadful sensation. Granted I mixed it a too heavy, 14% at first, then diluted to 11%. I will hope for the best as I dilute it down to 6-7%. If I get it to 6-7% and it is still intolerable I'm going to follow you around this forum every time you recommend the stuff and un-recommend it.
 
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here's the thing about coolant - what often behaves well and works well in one shop seems to be a demon from hell in another shop.
I presume some part of this is related to the water used in mixing, and some part in whatever tramp substances are on the work pieces, way oil, and so forth.
 








 
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