How often do you clean your machine and how clean does it usually look?

Jerry

By every use do you mean after every change in material i.e. steel, stainless, aluminum, cupronickel, tufnell, Ptfe etc. If so yes that sounds about right. As I see it, ****ty machine will get you ****ty work; only with pride in your tools will you have pride in your work!

Very CLean.... the machine I run came with a garden house... so after every job I cut.... I Blast away so she looks like new again!!!!

From my perspective your order of rank is a bit off. You have 'when the chips get in the way' second to bottom. On some of our production work we will take a cubic meter of chips out of the machine in a ten hour shift; our cleaning is almost continuous if you call running the chip auger almost constantly, cleaning. And the outside gets washed down on an almost constant basis because the operator goes stir crazy with a long cycle time.

I usually clean mine the morning after...all the coolant has drained away and the vac doesnt like coolant :) other than which it doesnt get used all the time so I dont have an excuse to not clean it :D

My oporators clean the machines anytime they have long cycle times or switch between materials. I feel it is important to recycle aluminum, stainless, PTFE. Why not get some Beer money and reduce the landfils when possible. Clean machines have less problems. Piles of chips puddle coolant over the dams and into areas that are not designed to contact coolant.