Coolant Pump

Scruffy1949 · Nov 1, 2021

My newly purchased LeBlond Regal 13x30 Lathe has a 3 phase drive motor and 3 phase coolant pump. My service is single phase. I bought a VFD for the drive motor (3 hp). How important is having the coolant pump? Should I get a single phase unit. I am a home hobbyist and not doing production work. I guess it could be handy if needed.

hvnlymachining · Nov 1, 2021

Congrats on the lathe. For most lathe work coolant is not necessary, however if you use much high speed steel tooling such as drills, reamers, form cutters etc. Your coolant system can be invaluable, especially in certain metals where heat causes hardening. We run light petroleum oil for coolant as it keeps everything better lubed, prevents rust and actually cools faster than water. You can find small rotary phase converters fairly cheap if you have a little patience and once you get a little experience with the lathe you will likely find more machines following you home that can use the rotary converters 3 phase power. Wether single phase or three, coolant will come in handy pretty often.

Happy Machining!

AlfaGTA · Nov 1, 2021

hvnlymachining said:
We run light petroleum oil for coolant as it keeps everything better lubed, prevents rust and actually cools faster than water.
!

Not true!.....Water moves and absorbs heat much better than oil.......
There are applications where oil is preferred over water based coolant....(note the name...COOLANT) Machining tasks like gear hobbing and broaching generally like oil because it handles
the high cutting loads and point pressures , but those jobs are generally low speed and heat removal is not the primary problem....

Cheers Ross

Joe Gwinn · Nov 1, 2021

Scruffy1949 said:
My newly purchased LeBlond Regal 13x30 Lathe has a 3 phase drive motor and 3 phase coolant pump. My service is single phase. I bought a VFD for the drive motor (3 hp). How important is having the coolant pump? Should I get a single phase unit. I am a home hobbyist and not doing production work. I guess it could be handy if needed.

I have a Clausing 5914, which is of similar size, and for many operations, flood coolant is very useful, and for parting off it's essential.

On the scale of a LeBlond, a small VFD just for the coolant pump is reasonable.

I use Automation Direct's house brands for such things. For instance:

https://www.automationdirect.com/ad...quency_drives_(vfd)/general_purpose/gs21-20p2

Overland · Nov 2, 2021

Most of the cooling pumps I've seen are very low hp; maybe 1/10 hp.
Check yours out, if I'm right, just wire it directly to the spindle drive VFD.
The additional hp is probably negligible and the VFD won't notice the additional load.

Or get a single phase coolant pump - they're quite inexpensive, like this:
SP-0180 Filterable Coolant Pump 1/10HP 180mm Single Phase 1PH 110/220V | eBay

Bob

Cole2534 · Nov 2, 2021

Tie the pump motor to the spindle motor with a 3 pole relay and use an HOA switch to send signal to the drive. H is spindle only, A is spindle and coolant pump.

I know, you're not supposed to place any switches between the drive and the load to prevent switching under load. I think one could design a circuit to accommodate this, just need the relay coil to be same voltage as the VFD's signal. Otherwise you'll need another relay.

FredC · Nov 2, 2021

When I bought my Lin Haun turret lathe from Enco way back when, they set it up so I could run it on single phase. The spindle had a buzz box for the added phase. The oil pump had a capacitor to approximate an added phase. That way the pump could run while the spindle was stopped during parts changes. I can not remember what size the capacitor was I threw it away when I got 3 phase.
You could ask for recommendations down the page at: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/transformers-phase-converters-and-vfd/ or just trial and error it till you get something that sounds and runs smooth.

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