Thought flood coolant was overkill until I lost a $400 insert

Ran a job in stainless on a used Haas down in Tucson without flood coolant for months. One afternoon the insert chipped and gouged the whole part. Now I run flood on anything harder than aluminum. Anybody else learn this the expensive way?

3 comments

3 Comments

diana51222d ago

Did you ever try running a mist system before switching to flood? I had a similar problem with a tough job in 304 stainless (ugh) and a mist setup saved my skin before I went full flood. The key for me was keeping the heat down at the cutting edge, not just blasting chips away. A $400 insert hurts, but I bet your cycle time is way more consistent now with flood.

jason_lewis322d agoProlific Poster

Mist systems never really worked for me on stainless like 304. You said "keeping the heat down at the cutting edge" and I think that's exactly where mist fails. The problem is mist just can't move enough heat away fast enough when you're pushing tooling hard. Sure it helps with chip evacuation some but the real issue with stainless is thermal shock to the insert. Flood coolant keeps everything stable and consistent temperature wise. Mist creates this hot cold cycling that actually cracks inserts faster in my experience. Plus the coolant cost with flood is way lower than replacing $400 inserts every few parts. Cycle time consistency matters more than anything for production work and mist always gives you that weird variation based on humidity or air pressure that day.

linda11422d ago

Do you think overthinking stuff like this is just human nature or what?

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