On 2012-01-04, Pete Keillor wrote:
What do those of you with horizontal mills do for swarf?

Don't need to go looking for it -- the mill generates plenty for
me without me asking. :-)

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.

What speed and what size cutters -- on what material? I tend to
use low enough RPMs so the swarf all goes away from me, and run a shop
vac after every pass or two (this for example with a 6" diameter cutter
stack adding up to 1-3/8" wide, in 6061-T6 aluminum.

Normally, at a sane speed for standard milling cutters for
horizontal mill arbors, the chips will be flying away from you (at least
where I stand with a lever feed on a Nichols horizontal mill). Same if
I've switched to the leadscrew. Feeding the work towards me,
conventional milling.

Now -- if you're using an end mill in a holder instead of
standard cutters on an arbor, your best bet is to stand there with a
shop vac sucking it up as it is created.

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.

Not familiar with the AR-15 sight wrench, so I don't have a feel
for the amount of swarf which will be created, but I suspect that it is
fairly small compared to what I have been doing mostly.

Of course, in commercial operations, there is usually a coolant
pump, and the coolant carries away the swarf, at least until the screen
to separate the swarf from the coolant gets full. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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