I’m not sure if this would work well or not but it was a thought I had. I get my MR1 hopefully this week but more than likely next week. Here is my hair-brained idea I was thinking about trying when I get it:
What if you had a wet / dry shop vac hooked to the drain(s) with a compressed air and / or coolant manifold ran to strategic places to direct chips to the drains. Kind of a push & pull… Ideally have a way to separate the bulk of the chips from the fluid - I’ve seen others just use filters but perhaps it could be done with a cyclone? I don’t know if that would work though or maybe that’s overkill< but it sounded like a cool idea to me. What do you think?
You are overthinking this. Your machine will come with the center rear drain. The problem is solved. Now, a good shop vac is a big timesaver in cleanup. I use one with a round brush head.
I just mounted my entire mill upside down to the ceiling so all of the chips and coolant fall out of the top opening onto the floor into a large hopper that directs the chips into a multistage centrifuge which separates the chips into 67 different particle sizes and organizes them into separate containers by use of a robotic conveyor system and also pumps the recovered coolant back up to the ceiling mounted mill making one continous loop. Super simple.
They actually have coolant / chip separation devices (without the sorting into different sizes, of course). They are just expensive so was thinking of something like a DIY hyrdocyclone that would allow constant flow and no need for swapping / cleaning of filters. I think it’s fun to automate all kinds of things and to find unique solutions like that, but that’s just me…
I have several coolant nozzle that help flush chips down the linear drains and then a pull out chip tray with a filter mesh for chip collection and filtering the coolant that then drains into the storage tank.
What do you think?
