On Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:34:22 -0600, Pete Keillor
wrote:

What do those of you with horizontal mills do for swarf? I finally
got the Hardinge TM mill cranked up and cutting, and have found the
swarf much more obnoxious than lathe stuff. I probably need to
increase feeds to make bigger chunks, but a shield might contain some
of the mess, too.

Made an AR-15 style sight wrench, used the mill for the teeth. Cool
to finally get it going. Next project will probably be cutting
keyways in its new x-axis screw.

Pete Keillor

What do we do for swarf? Make cuts. Need some swarf? Ive got barrels
full of it. Cheap too!!
VBG

Fortunately...G its pretty easy to deal with if you are cutting dry. A
bit of sheetmetal..a shop vac and voila..it takes care of the swarf.
On the other hand..cutting with coolant..that takes a bit more
invention. Generally ever horizontal mill Ive run required a guard that
was funnel shaped from above and was adjustable to account for the spray
of chips. All you need to do is block the rain of chips and keep em on
the table and periodically sweep them out of the T slots.
Sometimes..that can be a significant amount of the machine time.

Its easier to guard than a verticle mill as you only need to cover one
direction..rather than 360 degrees with a vertical.


Btw..Tom Gardner makes a Marvelous line of steel chip brushes for this
sort of thing.

http://ohiobrush.com/Pages/misc.html

The "loop brushes" work quite well for chip cleaning/control

Gunner

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that,
in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers
and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are
not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
Gunner Asch