Coolant supply to each machine

I have a barrel of coolant,connected to a garden hose. I roll the barrel trolley over to the machine, fill it, roll it back and put away the hose. Kind of a pain.

Do any of you guys just run a 1" pvc pipe down the side of the shop and distribute at the machine? Wondering if this is an easy idea or the beginning of a rube goldberg solution?

Yes for some we do. We use a diaphragm pneumatic pump and standard well water tank with pressure switch on the head end, ball valve at each machine, but we use galvanized steel pipe instead of plastic.

Guess it depends on the size of your shop, amount of machines as well as the guys running them.

Here...we use 5 gallon buckets. Start of each day it's one mans task to goes around checks machines fluids...check the concentration then fills accordingly. Runs skimmer on tanks requiring. If kept up with, its only a few buckets. Get lax..its a job to catch up At those times I think about filling a 55gal drum premixed and go around to top off. But then I think of storage issues for drum...drum not empty...then what.

But we are a smaller shop so, that may not work for larger places. But I think I'd still look to have coolant stations with water and raw coolant concentration over direct coolant piped to machines.

I find at times it's just water to be added...other times a standard mix. Not sure how that would be dealt with at the machines if your piped for a standard mix.

We have a recycling system, so the piped coolant is ran from that unit. It is slightly lower concentration than raw mix. We still check concentration daily, but we are an automated volume production shop so there is a lot of coolant loss to carry-out.

We use pex tubing throughout the plant to each machine. One mixed coolant, one water line to each machine. with concentration checked at least daily, usually twice a day. If you decide to do that, do yourself a favor and use standard ball valves at the machines in stead of spring loaded ones that will stick open over time! Seen a few floods from guys not making sure the spring valve closed!

I mentioned this before, but I have an automated system on my iPhone that fills my machines.


I text my kids and they come out an fill the machines. Now that they are teenagers, they can carry two buckets at a time. I pay them in Shasta soda, grape works, but I get better response time with orange.

We have two horizontals that run light outs, and sometimes will carry-out 20 gallons each into the chip bins overnight. We plumbed (3/4" copper) RO water from a drum of coolant with a liquid driven metering pump to each machine. Each machine has a float switch and solenoid valve to top off the machines independently, so we check concentration daily, adjust the mixer accordingly (sometimes even turn off the coolant) and let them take care of themselves. Before we had the auto top off working on the second machine, the coolant chiller would alarm out as it froze up because we were a little low on coolant in the tank - we had to solve that quickly!

I have seen a basic float valve set up on a couple machines at another shop, but I was worried that the tank would overfill as so much coolant is in the machine cavity and the float would allow it to continue to fill the tank. When the cycle would stop, all of that coolant would drain back into the tank and overflow. The float switch set up we use has about a 3" dead zone - the tank can be drawn down a few inches before it opens the solenoid valve.

Steve

We run a 1” pvc of di water around the shop and have two mixers at each machine

Adjustable CNC Coolant Mixer, Made in U.S.A., Fadal Haas Mori Mazak | eBay

DFrolka said:

We run a 1” pvc of di water around the shop and have two mixers at each machine

Adjustable CNC Coolant Mixer, Made in U.S.A., Fadal Haas Mori Mazak | eBay

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2 Year old, thread you dirty rotten spamer. Fuck off.

Is digger asleep at the wheel?

Dfrolka. In your heart of hearts, tell me you don't read that as De'fucker

machtool said:

Is digger asleep at the wheel?

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Naw...I sublet some of them out to you.....