Fixing a little mess with a big mess

this is my cnc machine don't let the video fool you it's actually really tiny I made it when I lived in a very small apartment and it had to fit between my desk and a wall I had just a couple feet to work with in fact you can see that the desk is actually folded underneath the CNC enclosure I'm having PTSD just looking at this it's designed to be as absolutely compact as was humanly possible I may have actually designed it to be a bit too compact it may be small but it is packed with features and amongst those features is a full flood coolant system which is why it has this enclosure it lets me make as big of a mess as I want flinging coolant and chips everywhere even in the department this is definitely a problem without the enclosure I know from experience overall it worked really well the only real problem was when the coolant got foul although recently it started to have accidents in the shop it's also feeling a little bit inadequate with him around so let's give it some much-needed TLC in the machine all surfaces are designed to lead south except for one surface which is this big flat area the problem is that this flat area can accumulate a bunch of coolant faster than it can drain and then this leads to it leaking I can fix the leaking coolant by just sealing up the tub a little better but the coolant accumulating and not going into the pump starves it of coolant which then reduces performance significantly I've been doing their traditional ritual of avoiding the problem until it becomes a huge one recently the mill started tripping my GFCI outlets and my initial reaction was just to move the plug to a non GFCI outlet and carry on but then I thought about it a little bit and if the GFCI is being blown that probably means that current is flowing through some place that it shouldn't meaning the mill so I thought right it's probably pretty good idea to install a ground wire on this which should prevent any current from flowing through me and then I thought maybe I need a warning and I need be careful not to touch the ground and the mill at the same time so thinking this through I realized I really should fix it because this could result in death of the pump at least I believe is happening is that the motor is sitting in the coolant and chips which are getting flung up into it by the cooling fan and this must have always been happening so I'm not sure why I didn't see this problem before maybe I'm weighing through the windings now I had this little protective fez I designed to keep chips and coolant out of the motor but I didn't anticipate the whole pan being flooded when I made it so I guess it's not enough to stop this problem so my plan is to cut out the entire flat area and replace it with a non flat area and this will be a newest sub assembly that all bolt on to the machine this is the CAD for my CNC machine what I've come up with for the coolant pump which is this blue container with this pump on top is tucking it down underneath the coolant tray so it's completely out of the way of coolant and chips and there's just no possibility of anything getting into the motor and what this also does is it gives me this big funnel so that truly all roads lead south now and there isn't any flat areas for for coolant to accumulate I've also added this large filter so this plate with all the screws in it there'll be a wire mesh in here which will filter all the coolant coming down into this funnel and it has a lot of surface area so I think I should have absolutely no problem getting the coolant through it there's a bunch of other details to getting this work I'll show them off as I as I build it so I have all the parts cut out and I am really loving the pen plotter on the plasma cutter it is so handy locating all these bends so all these parts fit up would be such a nightmare without that tool okay look at this part here each of these lines is a bend and if these bends aren't in the right spots they're not it's not going to line up with these parts it conforms to this bottom edge here and if I don't bend in all the right places then it won't fit at all I know my bending setup isn't the best I have had a much nicer bender on order for going on a month now they've shipped to to me so far and both of them have been destroyed in transit the first one they dropped off a truck allegedly the second one they brought to my house and it was shipped from the factory in a crate and when it got to my house it was just a bear tool and it covered in forklift blade scratches I don't know what the deal is but there's that they send a third one and they promised the third time's the charm shout out to these digital angle gauges they're super cheap and useful for all kinds of stuff for example turning my crappy bender into a slightly less crappy bender if you do anything with angles and who doesn't I highly recommend you pick one up this part is definitely the hardest one in the system the reason for that is it has a series of up-down up-down bends that are all at really oddball angles really wonder what kind of would design this part they have to be placed really accurately and bent very accurately because they line up with two side panels that they have to form a watertight joint with I don't think I could do this part without the pen plotter head I'm also using my press break to make a bunch of these bends and this is an awesome tool it has really long fingers that let you get into tight spots for oddball bends and the way the thing here's mount is really simple so if you want to make a custom finger for some of the needs a lot of clearance it's not hard to do it also is a 20-ton press so this will bend some seriously thick steel and it pairs really well with the plasma cutter for this reason you can cut out some three-eighths inch steel plate and then bend it into super-strong brackets and save yourself a lot of time welding or whatever normally whenever I make sheet metal parts I always go kind of crazy I always end up making some kind of Bend that I just can't do with the equipment that I have and have to resort to crazy shenanigans to get it bent but I was able to make all these bends and measure the angles with the equipment I have everything lines up which is cool these are the side pieces I'm actually going to be using a different technique than I've ever used before I cut out a bunch of these little tabs which I'm going to be bending and angling I'll be spot welding these in a bunch of locations and then I will try to spot weld the whole structure together I'm starting by welding all the tabs to the inner piece with all the bends then I'm gonna weld the two outer panels to that I'm shooting to have the tabs slightly shy of the edge that way they're actually pulling on the panels the spot water should not be sparking like this normally these parts that I plasma cut had a little bit of slag on them which I think was making a small gap those leading to arcing I wasn't too bothered by it so I didn't do anything about it but normally spot welding is not exciting at all you can you can see the tab is being compressed here and pulling the pieces together which is cool so let's just skip through all this boring stuff let's go to the next step normally I spend at least three-quarters of the time cursing at the welder and my fixturing and not only was this easy and it also is probably the best best results I've ever gotten the seams are really nicely lined up pen plotter helped a lot here placing all these bends really well the spot welding is definitely a really important part without better welding fixturing this would been very difficult to hold together and weld with the tape I do think I'm gonna go for it and just see if I can maybe weld some of these edges together since the fit is nice and tight just to see if I can I'm definitely gonna blow a hole in there but just give it a shot my TIG welding skills are not notable in any way in fact I'm probably below average so I'm not gonna be showing any glamor shots of the stacking dimes I don't think I've ever even done that this sequence here is enough just to show you what I was up to and we can move on to the next step I was actually able to weld all the edges and I think they're watertight the only way to really know is filled up the water and that's kind of hard to do with this big hole in the bottom I ground the edges just a little bit just to clean them up they're not the nicest welds but they they're there and I only punched two holes in it this is pretty cool this is definitely one of the best tub experiences I've ever had it's almost always a nightmare this is going to be the frame for the filter I'm gonna be using this 120 mesh stainless-steel screen the whole size is 125 microns about five thousand seven inch if chips get into the quant system they can clog up the nozzle and cause all kinds of issues so I think this will work if it doesn't work this is designed to bolt in so it doesn't really matter that's potato chip because it'll be bolted down to another piece and if it doesn't work I can just make another filter with a finer mesh this is just what I had available so I'm going to just basically glue it to this frame and then glue these pieces on top and that'll give me a sandwich with the filter in between that I can then just punch out these holes and then bolt into the assembly alright it's the next day time to find out if this thing worked the adhesive didn't stick nearly as well as I was hoping so I'm gonna just go over it with a spot welder this was particularly difficult spot weld because I was welding through the sealant that was already there and that's why there's all that smoke coming out of the weld joints this is the frame that holds the filter in place and the filter bolts on because I need to be able to replace it I know just know how I'm gonna drop a sharp tool down into it and punch a hole clean through it so to be able to replace it it bolts in and to be able to actually get those bolts in I need to somehow not have a nut on the back because I can't reach through there's a screen in the way the whole point of this is nothing can get through if it doesn't unless it goes through the screen so to solve that problem I'm going to be using rib nuts which are basically a cross between a rivet and a nut you can rivet them into a hole and they're threaded on the inside so they act like a nut but they don't turn in they're captive and fixed in place to install a roof nut very similar to a rivet so for they thread into the Riveter instead of just pushing in then you just give the Riveter a squeeze and the nut sets into place hopefully basically forever this is actually a pretty tricky part to get right because it has to fit quite snugly into this space here and so if I'm off at all it's not gonna fit so well and I'd actually rather be undersized and oversized if I overshoot there's no chance of getting it in there without bending the walls but if I understood I can actually Bend these flanges out which is why I designed it this way so that it basically can can widen up to fill this gap and it looks like it's a pretty good fit but I'll probably need to bend out a small amount maybe half a millimeter or so before I bolt the filter down install one last piece so what this piece does is it ensures that the coolant goes into the coolant tank flowing liquids have this really annoying property where when they flow out of a hole they'll tend to travel along the surface that's horizontal even and so what I don't want to happen is pulling is flowing out this hole and it's going sideways and then leaving the system and so what this does is it's basically a lip or a rim the coil will flow through here and then it has to drip off this rim if it wants to flow sideways it has to go back up a vertical wall which it can't do so the new drain is done and in order to install it I have to remove the old one as well as cut a big hole in the bottom of the enclosure and I was being extremely careful here because I have a whole tank of coolant that I really didn't want to spill and this was hard because the enclosure is too big for me to reach around so I was having to reach through the little hole to hold it up oh no that's not good well I guess I'm kitty litter you should have kitty litter in your shop hopefully you'll never need it but you'll be really glad when you do so this is pretty ironic because I was thinking the whole time that I have to be really careful not to spill this coolant I was holding on to the coolant pump very carefully and it turns out the coolant pump is not attached to the coolant tank I thought that it was but the screws that I was unscrewing actually go through the coolant pump and into the tank and they're not attaching the other way so as soon as the last screw came out it dropped neil has had a lot of accidents on the floor this is the first time it's taken a dump well that was now where I was not expecting to be spending so on the bright side I was worried about having to handle that container of coolant and spilling it and now don't worry about any more because I just got it out of the way up front and spilled it all there's no more coal left to spill so I'm good and in a way this is basically a win you know if we use business logic actually there is still a bit more coolant to spill and I just spilled it I thought I got all the coolant out of the pump but now it's all out so now we're good no more coolant to spill it's a really bad idea to grind near the mill because the sparks coming off the grinder are actually little pieces of hot steel and when they cool down there's still little pieces of steel and if you get these many moving parts of the mill it can really wreak havoc on a lot of stuff so I put this giant trash bag over it just to keep everything off it and I'm also cutting from the bottom both because it's easier to get in there also just to keep less steel dust off the machine building this enclosure is what convinced me to build the plasma cutter because it is such an absolute pain to cut through 60 caged steel especially upside-down Institue like this but even just building this enclosure was such a pain without the plasma cutter similar to the filter mount I'm using rib nuts to hold this onto the machine and this will let me easily get it off if I need to do service in the future the most likely service I might need to do is taking it off to add more sealant between it and the rest of the enclosure it is designed so that coolant shouldn't be able to leave but we'll see about that now I'm using my fancy leg support to get everything bolted on and the fit is really good I didn't have to really force anything to fit this is the coolant pump and it needs them out here so I cut out and spot welded up a little stand that will bolt here and it has slots so basically I can can raise and lower this up and down to get the spout into the hole on the coolant and then I just made this little cross beam here to give it strength and torsion there's just four rib nuts that hold everything on I promise if you haven't used rib nuts for stuff like this before they're awesome it's so much better than trying to deal with little nuts the coolant tank and pump is now mounted most importantly the motor is now tucked under here totally out of the way of coolant and chips before I was getting all kinds of coolant and chips into this cooling fan in the bottom which was shooting coolant into the motor itself causing ground faults hopefully the motor is still good but if it does die I can replace it easily because everything is serviceable and removable hopefully without dropping the entire cooling container on the ground again so finally the moment I've been waiting for which is getting to turn this thing on and see if it works did I make it right 50% odds I didn't and on initial running everything seems good I ran it for about an hour there's no leaks and no slow down to the coolant you got a big billet in here it's about a two and a half inch cube and I'm gonna just machine it down take off maybe an inch or so and this should be a good test of the coolant system chip build-up and all that stuff [Music] so the top half of the billet is now down here in the drain and that looked really good there's still some material up so I'm going to keep going with another pass [Music] so I turned the two inch tall billet into a half inch thick plate not a very useful application of the CNC machine but there was a useful test and there's a ton of chips down here and it had absolutely no problem whatsoever draining even with all these chips everything was going right through there was no build-up and no leaking anywhere which is really actually kind of surprising and great to see I definitely couldn't have done this with my previous setup what would have happened is that all the coolant would have pulled on this flat area especially with the chip buildup block in the small filter the motor would been full of coolant and chips and they've been cooling all over the floor and then there wouldn't be any coolant coming out of the sprayer either so let's look at these coolant systems side by side there's a really small subtle difference between them one of them is submerged in coolant and has a bunch of chips being blown up into the motor windings the other one doesn't you know it's okay if you can't see it it's it is very subtle but trust me it's there and it's a really nice improvement I was trying to optimize all things coolant and I came up with a new coolant sprayer design that fixes a bunch of issues I was having with the old one but this video is getting a bit long at this point so I'll save this one for later I did want to show it off because it's super cool and works a whole lot better than it did before so overall I'm really happy with this coolant system it performs a million times better than the previous one I think the spot welding technique for building tubs I'm sure I didn't invent this I'm certain I didn't but it works really well I highly recommend it and it was a whole lot easier to build this oddball tub that way if you like what you see you should consider subscribing it's the best way to show me that you want more and otherwise if you have comments or questions or anything leave in the comments I'd love to read them and as I got for now thank you

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 1,170,181

Rating: 4.9542642 out of 5

Keywords: cnc, flood coolant, cnc machine, mill, prototyping, build, diy, cnc diy, cnc machining, milling machine, cnc mill, diy cnc, sheet metal, how to, plasma cutter, cnc plasma, 3d printed, 3d print, 3d printing, Cnc milling, diy flood coolant system, cnc flood coolant system, flood coolant system for mill, cnc mill conversion, cnc machines for metal, cnc milling machine, cnc machine tools, sheet metal fabrication, coolant reservoir, cooling system

Id: 1de6fO-9ZDU

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020