DIY Coolant Pump For Milling

A lot easier to buy a working coolant system on ebay. You can also look into buying a misting cooler.

Like this?

Looks nice, and I like the pneumatic for pressure. Would make it a lot easier to get the pressure and volume you want, but it does nothing for recovery. In fact by using a pressurized tank you would have to do recovery as totally separate and non-automated process. I probably won't buy one, but I may make one now that I have seen that. Maybe set up a recovery reservoir with a float switch that does an auto shutdown when my recovery reservoir gets to about 1/2 the capacity of the oiler. Then I'ld never run out of oil if I walked in the office to get a soda and got distracted.

Mister? I guess you could do it with a venturi style pickup instead of a pressurize tank, and then just play with your pickup and nozzle size to get a nice spray.

I was thinking along the lines of what I sold a while ago:

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I did some research , ended up designing and building a mister that uses a pressurized supply . You CAN inject the used coolant back into the tank , just use a small orifice . Check out water injectors for steam boilers , some use a similar device . The reason for pressurizing the supply is to help reduce water/coolant vapor in the air . The air supply is at a lower pressure , therefore the mist is of a "coarser" consistency . Larger "droplets" mean less evapotation , and less moisture in the air . The last thing I want around my machine tools is a moist environment .

The smallest submersible aquarium or pond pump should work fine from Home Depot or Walmart. That's all that is used on the kerosene parts washers.

?Itemnumber=45303 Leaving aside the canard that WD-40 is just a perfumed petroleum distillate of kerosene weight.

Our buddies at Harbor Freight got you again with item 45333, which while not found in the online listing is in their printed catalogs. 2 gallon flood type coolant system, $40 reg, seen on sale for $29, tank, pump and mag base flexible coolant nozzle.

BTW, Also at Harbor Freight:

I'm speculating for these comments, because I don't know what is the best product that would/could be used with your machine (or why Taig says not to use water-based coolant/lubricants).

I think there is a difference between water-based and water soluble lubricants, which could be explored.

There are some glycerine-based cutting lubricants available, which are water soluable, which doesn't mean I'm suggesting you use water on your machine, but the water soluble characteristic is very favorable since the workpieces can be rinsed clean with water.

There are likely to be some Taig user groups on Yahoo or other forums (or you could start one). I would imagine that some users are using something other than WD-40 (although I realize some folks believe there isn't anything better for any application that's better than WD-40)

I would be reluctant to use a hydrocarbon cleaning solvent-type coolant for machining, adding some to a bandsaw cut is one thing, but having a volume of it sitting around (and pooling in a chip pan, on shop rags etc) doesn't sound very good to me. I wouldn't consider automatic transmission fluid to be the ultimate answer either. There are probably other DIY concoctions being used that probably don't have very good properties for cutting metal.

I believe WD-40 is primarily made up of Stoddard solvent, or something very much like Stoddard, which is a great cleaning solvent, BTW.

Glycerine-based cutting lubricants are going to be non-flammable, unlike WD-40 or Stoddard. One of the glycerine products that I'm familiar with is Lenox Pro Tool Lube. I've used it a lot, and it's performance is great. It's viscosity is more like liquid dish soap, not as thin as water or WD-40 (although it can be thinned). The only disadvantage of the PTL is that it can soften the paint that's on my machines from China, not immediately on contact, but it will if I let a dribble sit on the paint for a while. I don't consider this to be a serious problem though.

Aside from flooding, squirting or spraying methods, you might want to consider gravity. Having a steady, adjustable drip just ahead of the tool path (or directed directly onto the cutting tool) shouldn't be too difficult to set up.

A recovery tank would hold the run-off, lifting and pouring or a simple hand pump could be used for transferring enough liquid for a work session up to the delivery vessel. One of the squeeze-bulb hand pumps used for priming an outboard boat motor might suffice if there aren't any chips suspended in the liquid.

The flooding process works very well for carrying chips away from the cutting tool though, which definitely has benefits.

Plus misting introduces a constant contamination of the atmosphere, deeply inhalable micro droplets and vapor of questionable microbial sanitation and anticorrosion chemicals. But I suppose that's better than emulsified swine fat that's been in a bucket for months. Flooding with petroleum hydrocarbons sounds better all the time.

Hi Bob,

That is a siphon mister unit, a fairly big one.... Most small milling operators tend to use misters as when they are set right (a little sputter these days) they are cleaner than anything other than dry or microdrop machining. A gallon of really good synthetic can run up to 25 bucks but at the right mix rate and output settings will net you 250 to

500 hours of machining. The only real downside is the air use (compressor noise) and cost (more electricity for the compressor).

You can make your own as most low buck misters just have a small tube extending a bit into the airflow tube at about 80 degrees perpendicular.

Matt

I just asked my local furnace/ AC repair guy to save me an oil fired furnace's pump for me the next time he replaced a furnace. This is the unit that pumps the heating oil through a nozzle to spray it into the combustion/heating chamber. Free for the asking! I haven't set it up on the old Bridgeport yet but it's 110V and I can pretty much use it as is. I just have to plumb some lines to it using the threaded input and output ports and close the re-circulation port too. I believe I originally heard of this in this group?

Tim Finger Lakes region of NY

I would imagine that is why most misters now sputter or spit instead of fog. You definitely want to use synthetic instead of soluble oil in these things because of breathing issues.

Also even though the smoke produced from cutting is not seen with a mister it is still there and one should be aware that all lubricated cutting produces vapors that are harmful in too large a quantity (even the very expensive microdrop "dry" units with the very enviro "pretty" lubricants.

Matt

swamp cooler pumps cost about $20 and work well enough for water based coolants. Simply stick one in a 5 gallon bucket with the return line back into the bucket.

shrug...if you elevate the bucket to just below table level, they will also work well enough for light oil coolants Gunner

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..." Maj. Gen. John Sedgewick, killed by a sniper in 1864 at the battle of Spotsylvania

I was thinking of the misters that just spray water, but with a little ethanolamine or something in the water to prevent rusting your tooling and machinery. It doesn't matter much between fog vs spray, because you're going to get fine particulates floating about consisting at least of water hardness minerals if nothing else after the droplets vaporize.

I have to agree. Breathing the mist can be very unpleasant. I wear a

3M oil-mist-rated mask while using a mister.

Joe Gwinn

Does anyone here remember T-nut, who bought a machine shop, where they were using misting coolant, which irritated his lungs (a precursor of lung cancer in my memory was actual cause) so he removed all mist cooling systems from his shop. After that it killed all ideas of buying anything from Enco or any other vendor who sold these. My recommendation is to use oil based coolant, no water/emulsions as you must clean up every time you use this to prevent machine rust. Ignator

There are many soluble oils. You can find several (at least) at the local oil company - not auto-parts - but the guys with tanks in the back and often have rail road access. They have the books and connections.

But many are available from MSCdirect and other suppliers. Trim Sov is one I use on my saw and it is a good general purpose oil.

Mart> I'm speculating for these comments, because I don't know what is the

Because there is a lot of aluminum mounted to steel in the machine. Very far apart on the electrolytic scale, so add water (especially with salts which increase the conductivity) and you are soon etching your machine. The spindle and the tailstock ram are both mounted in aluminum extrusions. The cross-slide body is aluminum. The bed is an inverse steel dovetail mounted to an aluminum extrusions for a base, and the base is filled with concrete for rigidity. The headstock, tailstock, and carriage all are aluminum mounting to the steel.

I've got a Taig from before the days that it had a Taig name on it -- bought at a hamfest when Taig was just getting started.

I would not use even the water soluble ones if they are hygroscopic (absorb water vapor from the air).

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I'm pretty sure that there is one there -- but since I don't use Yahoo (or other web-based forums), I don't know for sure.

Well ... WD-40 is a nice cutting fluid for aluminum, but I would not use it on steel. For that -- I would use the high sulfur threading oil sold for pipe threading -- painted on with an acid brush. For stronger machines, I've used SulFlo (a variant with powdered sulfur in sufficient quantities so it makes a nice paint-on paste. But you want good ventilation with the high sulfur stuff. :-)

Motivation to clean up after the project? :-)

It is again a pretty good one to use for cutting aluminum, but not for steel.

Exactly. Not really an oil, but it does carry chips away nicely when cutting aluminum with a slitting saw blade.

But may attract and hold water -- thus etching away the Taig (and probably a Sherline is similar, though I've never had one to play with.)

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My Nichols horizontal mill has a hook at one end of the bed which is also a pouring lib. You hang a small bucket from it, put another bucket up high with a bottom drain to the drip pipe, and every so often pause and dump the lower bucket into the upper one. It also has provisions for a big rectangular funnel with a filter grid which leads to a reservoir in the base, and a mounting plate for a pump to recirculate the coolant. It is all cast iron and steel, so water-based coolants can be used more safely with it -- especially with anti-rust additives.

Filters.

Chips -- and heat. Probably not a problem with the limited motor size of a Taig or a Sherline, but larger tools can benefit from that -- including not having to wait for a workpiece in the lathe to cool down before you can accurately measure the diameter. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

I am mostly working with aluminum.

Exactly

Depends. A small cutter turning at max RPM gets pretty darn hot if you do not cool it, but carrying away chips is paramount when cutting aluminum as they are work hardened and will damage your work piece if not your cutter.

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I'd suggest NOT using an electric (i.e. 12 VDC) fuel pump. Many of these have brushes and commutator designed to run immersed in fuel. For diesel or gasoline, this isn't a problem, as the fuel is clean and non-conductive. But for recycled cutting oil, eventually the concentration of small metallic particles will rise to the point at which they might short the commutator segments.

110 VAC aquarium pumps that have wetted rotors won't suffer from this problem since they are induction motors with no brushes or commutators. However both types might bind up if the metallic contaminants are magnetic and are attracted to the rotor/stator gap to the point at which they jamb the rotor.