Bob La Londe wrote:

On 3/21/2011 7:07 PM, Pete C. wrote:

Bob La Londe wrote:

"Pete wrote in message
ster.com...

BQ340 wrote:

On 3/21/2011 4:37 PM, Ignoramus1419 wrote:
On 2011-03-21, Bob La wrote:
So purely as an intellectual exercise... assume that water is 100%
not
available in any form. What would you use as a cutting
coolant/lubricant for milling aluminum.

As far as I know, you have two options:

1) Vegetable oil based mist cooling, which you may not like for many
reasons.

2) A blast of cold air.

Both have powerful negatives. Mist coolant settles on everything in the
shop and also spreads chips everywhere. Blast of cold air spreads
chips everywhere.

i

Cold air will scatter the chips out of the way, but won't do anything
for surface finish quality?

Chip evacuation will certainly help the finish by eliminating chip
welding, the biggest issue.

I would think that dispersing chips was all it did you wouldn't need to cool
it would you?

Dispersing the chips is sufficient at manual Bridgeport RPMs, i.e. 2,700
RPM. At your RPM and with the tiny cutters you use the cooling may help.
Certainly it is easy enough to try just normal compressed air.

I just finished making a manifold about 10 minutes ago to do just that
with a Lokline on one side and a quick coupling nipple on top. Sadly I
broke the little control valve on the Lokline so I had to regulate the
flow with the compressor regulator. I tried plane compressed air a
while back, and it seemed to help a tiny bit, but I was turning half the
speed at the time. My poor little 30 gallon compressor is certainly
cycling on quite often this time. Would have just used my long air gun
with a bungee cord around the trigger, but I couldn't find it.

You know. This whole thread I think has gone off kilter. I probably
should have said "lubricant" rather than coolant. Even a film of WD on
the surface of aluminum seems to make a noticeable difference. I just
don't want to spray or pour WD unsupervised into a cabinet with a brush
motor spindle in it. Well, that and I didn't plan the cabinet very
well. It would probably take 2-3 gallons to make sure I had a good flow
through the filter screen basket back into the pump.

I use the loc-line mag base with a quick connect. The valve helps in
regulating the air, but you need to use a fine nozzle and adjust your
air pressure. I use a 1/16" nozzle and was running about 15 PSI on my
regulator without a valve in the loc-line the last time I used it.