Shop Projects

This is where I am going to stick all of the upgrades to the shop and machinery.

First up is the latest coolant system revision. I was tired of getting chips and sediment in my old coolant reservoir and having the coolant evaporate out of the open top reservoir. So I purchased a 10 gallon Sterlite snap-top plastic container, smaller snap-top container, some fittings and pipe, tubing, a kitchen strainer and some pure white felt. (This will all make sense in a little bit.)

The enclosure is the one I built last fall and is still doing its job. I moved the doors to hinge from inside the enclosure so anything that sprayed onto the doors runs down inside the lip of the enclosure instead of out front and onto the floor. I still have to wipe down the bottom edge of the doors when I open them after a coolant-heavy operation though otherwise you get a lot of coolant dripping onto the floor.

From there the coolant runs down through hole in the left rear of the enclosure (the enclosure is shimmed to drain to that corner) and down into a drain mounted in the MDF countertop. (Ignore the bottle cap epoxied over the hole that I drilled in the incorrect spot the first time through.)

You can see through the space between the bottom of the enclosure floor and the countertop the drain (just an ordinary shower drain from the hardware store)

From there the coolant and chips drain down the pipe to a chip catcher - just a fine-mesh strainer from Wal-Mart.

After the large chips are filtered out the coolant runs into a small snap-top container with a felt particulate filter hot-glued in place. This catches all of the small chips and tiny metal shavings that you don't want to settle to the bottom of the coolant reservoir. This lengthens the life of the pump, plus I'm not throwing metal shavings back onto the part I'm machining.

Notice how much debris the particulate filter caught after just a few nights of machining. I may have to revise this filter to some other material due to flow issues though.

And finally the filtered coolant flows through a hole in the bottom of the top container, into a funnel and into the large coolant reservoir.

Lurking in there somewhere is a 200 GPH sumbersable pump and 2 large fish tank aerators. The air pump sits right behind the reservoir on the floor. I still need to get an adjustable timer for the air pump though to keep it stirred everyday so the coolant doesn't separate and get nasty.

And thats it for now! I'll run this setup for a few more weeks and see how everything turns out. If there's something that needs revising, I'll make it work, but for now it seems to be working flawlessly!

If you have any questions or comments concerning the content of this page, feel free to email agrueni@charter.net.