[madmac]

Anybody out there have an idea for building a chip spinner? I'm generating steel, aluminum and brass chips. The chips are covered with cutting oil. I've been letting them sit in screen bottomed drums to let the oil drain out. Never get it all and the drums take up room. I would like to have a small spinner(5 gal. =\-) to make it happen faster. Ideas?

[underthetire]

There used to be something called a puck master or something like that. It would squeeze the chips in to little hockey pucks, and in doing so pushed all the coolant/oil out of them.

[Geof]

Puck masters, or whatever they are called, that compress the chips into almost a solid mass squeezing out all the cutting oil do exist but the smallest one I have ever found has a capacity of hundreds or thousands of pounds per day and needs an electric supply capable of driving a 20 hp or larger motor.

Why not see if you can get hold of one of the water extractors that are in laundromats. They spin the clothes much faster than a regular washing machine and would probably spin the oil out. You would need to make a porous can to go inside the spinner to make it easy to empty.

[madmac]

Thanks guys, Puck master and or a laundry machine sounds OK. I'm looking for something much smaller. Typically a 8-9 hr. shift will produce 1-2 gallons of chips. This is a 5C size CNC gang tool lathe. The lathe has a chip drawer with a strainer drain. Current habit is to clean out the drawer in the morning transfering the chips to a 5gal. paint bucket with a screen bottom. when the bucket gets full, it can take weeks for the bulk of the oil to drip out. And it never all comes out.
So here is my idea. And this is not fully fleshed out. An enclosure with a driven shaft mounted verticaly, on the top end of the shaft , a container shaped so that a 5 gal. plastic bucket with a bunch of holes in the side sits inside with maybe 1 inch of space around it. Some sort of filter membrane inside the bucket.
Dump chips into the bucket. Lid on the bucket. Lid on the enclosure. Spin it up. Oil is forced out of the chips into the container, into the enclosure where the oil can be drained and put back into the lathe sump. As it is said, the devil is in the details.
Anyway, thats what I'm thinking on. I would like to keep this thing under a 2'x2' footprint.

[Geof]

I have an alternate suggestion that may be easier to implement. Simply blow hot air downwards through the oil soaked chips. The rate at which the oil drains out depends on the force of gravity and the viscosity of the oil. Your spinner increases the 'gravitational' force, heating reduces the viscous drag and an airstream blows the oil downwards.

Just don't get the air too hot, aiming a tiger torch at the top of the bucket will remove the oil in a non-reusable form.

[madmac]

I can only imagine what the tiger torch is, but I get the picture! I'l try this outside. Just discovered that I have a 500 watt band type drum heater, might be just the thing. No air, but decreasing the viscosity will speed it up.
Thanks

[Geof]

I can only imagine what the tiger torch is, but I get the picture! Thanks

This picture?

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAMMKR_xK2M"]YouTube - Snowman VS Tiger torch[/nomedia]

Your drum heater may not work very efficiently because it relies on conduction. Chips, even though they are metal, a remarkably good insulation because they do not make good contact with each other.

[madmac]

Good point, I've used them for annealing cooling tho they were not saturated with cutting oil.

[DouglasR]

I believe you can buy a spinner easily enough. The shop I used to work for had one for the screw machines. Quite a bit of oil came out of those chips.