Home>Projects>Completed>Making a flood coolant setup on a Taig milling machine
Flood Coolant Setup
by John
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Adding flood coolant to my CNC Taig milling machine was one of the best things I could have done. The surface finish of machined parts, as well as tool life increased exponentially. Adding a flood coolant setup is relatively easy and cheap.
The first thing you will need is an enclosure for the mill. Mine is built out of plexiglass and glued together (using an acrylic bonding glue which melts the two pieces together). The glue is available from places like MSC Direct. You need to make sure that the enclosure is large enough to handle the mill at the full extent of it's travel. I have the 2019CR model Taig mill, which is the mill with the extended table. The dimensions of my enclosure are 3' wide by 2' tall by 2' deep. I used 3/8" plexiglass just to make sure the enclosure would be sturdy enough. There is a cutout in the top of the enclosure to allow for the z-axis stepper motor and the spindle motor to stick out. The enclosure could have been made larger to accomodate the motors, but I used what I had handy.
Mill in the plexiglass Enclosure
The front panel on the enclosure is attached on the top by plexiglass hinges. I got magnets meant for cabinet doors from home depot and use those to latch the door shut. I also used a drawer handle from home depot on the front panel to make it easy to open and close. Around this panel I placed door/window weatherstripping to keep coolant from leaking out. The weatherstripping didn't seal very well in some places and coolant was running underneath of it, so I added a layer of duct tape on top of the weather stripping for added protection. On the bottom of the enclosure I put in a stainless steel sink drain for coolant to run through back to the tank.
The coolant tank itself is a $2 plastic Sterilite container I picked up from Walmart. In order to filter chips out of the coolant, I used a piece of aluminum tubing that sits between the drain and the coolant tank. The aluminum tube has a flat plate welded to the bottom with aluminum feet welded to that in order to keep it upright. A series of holes was drill in the sides of the tube for the filtered coolant to run through, and a piece of stainless steel screen/mesh was wrapped around the inside to act as the filter. I was worried about the screen catching everything at first, but it's worked very well for me. I just recently cleaned the coolant tank, and the only stuff that made it through the filter were very small particles, basically dust.
Coolant Tank - ignore the duct tape, I cracked the plastic while moving
The coolant itself is water soluble coolant, in a 35:1 mixture. As you can see in the picture, there is a little bit of what's known as tramp oil floating on the top at the walls of the container. This tramp oil would normally spread across the entire surface and cause the coolant to grow bacteria. However, I added a fish tank aerator which sits in the bottom of the tank and bubbles. This does two things, it breaks the surface tension, pushing the tramp oil to the side, and it helps the coolant get more oxygen. An alternative to this would be to purchase an oil skimmer which constantly runs, skimming oil off the top. However, the skimmers run a minimum of $100, which was well above my budget. I've been using the same coolant for two years now with the fish tank aerator and haven't had any problems with the coolant growing bacteria of starting to smell.
A small fountain pump inside the container pumps the coolant out through a 1/4" NPT fitting up to the coolant block on my mill. The block fits over the T-slots on the spindle head and is held in place by two 10-32 screws. The coolant hoses I used were very similar to the LOC-Line brand commonly found in machine tool catalogs, and are available from MSC for about $10.
Spindle up close
I got some what decorative with machining the block for the coolant setup because quite frankly, I was bored and had nothing else to do. After I finished machining the block, I anodized it blue so that it would look pretty.
The last step to do was to bend up some sheet aluminum covers for the stepper motors to keep them dry and un-damaged. For this I used .040" aluminum. Orignially I spot welded the covers into their shapes, but later had to go back and break the spot welds so that I could actually get an allen wrench inside to get to the stepper motor's fasteners.