Preface this by saying, I don't know what I'm doing and I am not a trained machinist.
I was using a haas in my garage shop for a couple years and "upgraded" to a DNM5700.
I mostly cut aluminum. Some steel. I cut plastic one time.
It has a left side discharge LNS turbo chip conveyor.
My complaints:
The very first time I ran it I didn't turn the chip conveyor on. I was sitting at the machine watching it run and about 40 minutes in the coolant stopped flowing. I walked around to the back of the machine and the entire sump had emptied on the floor and flowed down a nearby drain. Chips (aluminum) had built up on the conveyor belt, which somehow allowed all the coolant to just flow onto the floor.
I now run the conveyor any time the machine is on.
However, the chip conveyor sits flush with the top of the coolant tank and a LOT of coolant spashes on the floor. If I wipe up the floor clean, in less than 2 hours I will have a 3 foot diameter puddle and a small pile of chips. The distributor claims this "isn't right" but also has no suggestions on how to fix it short of making some sort of close off with rubber and tape.
The collection pan at the conveyor discharge will fill so full of aluminum chips that I have to scrape it out twice a day. If I had to guess I'd say about 25% of the chips wind up having to be manually scraped into the chip bin. The pan in my haas i probably had to scrape out 10 times in 2 years.
The coolant pump sits in it's own little area and has a weird box filter, then a fine screen behind that. If I forget to clean that screen every couple hours, the pump will run dry.
I recently had a part with a 70 hour run time, so I pulled that small screen out. But earlier today the pump shut off even though the tank was full because the inlet to the pump got clogged. Now I am paranoid that I have to be right here on top of the machine because the coolant could shut off at any time...
At this point I don't know what to do, because I'm spending an hour each day just scooping chips when I used to be doing other stuff. Not to mention the floors in my shop are now WAY dirtier and need to be mopped every week just from all the coolant splashing everywhere. Also, I should mention that I usually run the machine for less than 5 hours a day.
The distributor is trying to sell me a 20,000 dollar filter conveyor, but I'm not certain that's going to solve my problem, and it's also 1/5 of what I paid for the machine just to handle the same chips that my haas handled fine with just an auger for 2 years.
The machine seems decent enough otherwise. Here is a recent project I made on it:
I was using a haas in my garage shop for a couple years and "upgraded" to a DNM5700.
I mostly cut aluminum. Some steel. I cut plastic one time.
It has a left side discharge LNS turbo chip conveyor.
My complaints:
The very first time I ran it I didn't turn the chip conveyor on. I was sitting at the machine watching it run and about 40 minutes in the coolant stopped flowing. I walked around to the back of the machine and the entire sump had emptied on the floor and flowed down a nearby drain. Chips (aluminum) had built up on the conveyor belt, which somehow allowed all the coolant to just flow onto the floor.
I now run the conveyor any time the machine is on.
However, the chip conveyor sits flush with the top of the coolant tank and a LOT of coolant spashes on the floor. If I wipe up the floor clean, in less than 2 hours I will have a 3 foot diameter puddle and a small pile of chips. The distributor claims this "isn't right" but also has no suggestions on how to fix it short of making some sort of close off with rubber and tape.
The collection pan at the conveyor discharge will fill so full of aluminum chips that I have to scrape it out twice a day. If I had to guess I'd say about 25% of the chips wind up having to be manually scraped into the chip bin. The pan in my haas i probably had to scrape out 10 times in 2 years.
The coolant pump sits in it's own little area and has a weird box filter, then a fine screen behind that. If I forget to clean that screen every couple hours, the pump will run dry.
I recently had a part with a 70 hour run time, so I pulled that small screen out. But earlier today the pump shut off even though the tank was full because the inlet to the pump got clogged. Now I am paranoid that I have to be right here on top of the machine because the coolant could shut off at any time...
At this point I don't know what to do, because I'm spending an hour each day just scooping chips when I used to be doing other stuff. Not to mention the floors in my shop are now WAY dirtier and need to be mopped every week just from all the coolant splashing everywhere. Also, I should mention that I usually run the machine for less than 5 hours a day.
The distributor is trying to sell me a 20,000 dollar filter conveyor, but I'm not certain that's going to solve my problem, and it's also 1/5 of what I paid for the machine just to handle the same chips that my haas handled fine with just an auger for 2 years.
The machine seems decent enough otherwise. Here is a recent project I made on it:
