Setting up flood coolant

Hi -

I'm setting up a flood coolant system on my old 14-1/2" South Bend lathe. I bought a cheap 3gal tank+pump from Enco along with some koolmist water soluble stuff. My problem is how best to set up the system on the lathe to get good drainage back to the tank. My first idea was to tilt the lathe slightly so the coolant ran to the back left corner of the chip pan (back side near the headstock) where I drilled a few drain holes to allow the coolant to drip back into the tank. This was convenient, but I hadn't considered the coolant on the ways. The coolant that gets on the ways runs back under the headstock and finds its way down into the drive compartment and onto the floor, not good. I guess that I should change the tilt to get the coolant to run toward the tailstock end, but I'm not sure this will completely solve the problem and I'd like to hear how others have their lathes set up with flood coolant.

-Jeff Taylor

When I added coolant to my Jet 13 x 40 GHB lathe I made the drain hole about 12 inches in front of chuck face and about 6" of centerline of the chuck towards the back splash guard. I made a device to make a dish in the coolant pan so my drain adapters top edge would be flush with the pan surface. Drain adapter is a typical sink strainer assembly as found on those smaller bar sinks about 1 1/4" in diam. After recessing of dishing the pan to fit the adapter, I used a 4 x 4 and a sledge to sort of put a slight bow in the pan at this point. Its not all that obvious just looking at it, but it bowed it sufficiently so that all coolant flows to this area and into ther sink strainer adpater, which has a tail piece such as found on a sink that leads directly to a chip strainer (kitchen type mesh collander abouyt 4" in diam) and then directly into the top of my resivoir (15 gal short drum).

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