I love the mill, love the operating system, but I could not stand how bad coolant went everywhere. All over the walls and the floor...It was a total mess. So, some good friends and I brainstormed. On the HAAS TM-1, the left side coolant catch panel was not long enough to clear the X-axis home position. So instead of mickey-mousing some extension setup, we decided to make a whole new panel. We fabricated the catch pan making it 3 inches longer than the standard panel, sanded all rough edges, and got some paint that matched perfectly and started paintin. That extra 3 inches of clearance made it possible to box in the X-axis without cutting a hole in the side like other home-built enclosures that I have seen.

We cut out diamond plate to fit all sides and made sure everything was gonna line up. Then, again, we rounded off all sharp edges and put a couple bends here and there for appearance, strength, and clearance. Everything clears and so far all coolant is staying in the machine.

A good friend constructed a front flip-door out of smoked plexiglass that would prevent heavy splashing from coolant hitting the center-bottom pathway. I put the door on hinges so I can clean out chips once they build up. And, last but not least, we cut out a final piece of diamond plate with an acute angle on top that slides in and out the front of the machine just as a "secondary block-out" incase the coolant really starts to flow.

Below are a few pictures I snapped with a cell phone. I apologize for the poor quality of the pictures, but I'm pretty sure you can get an idea of what was done here! Hope this setup helps somebody out there.

Nice work. Looks very professional.

Just got my new TM-1P today! Looking forward to having a nice machine.

John

I also grew tired of cleaning up a never ending mess, Running for my life from flying crap and taking a bath in coolant. I decided to design and build and enclosure for the mill that would have plenty of room inside, be fully enclosed with a roof on it, have a setup to accept a flood coolant system and a chip auger. This is what I came up with. I still have not gotten to the auger yet but that will come when I have time to do it. The coolant system uses a waterfall pump from Home Depot and is wired into the control. The biggest issue that I ran into is that the controler was too far into the machine to build the cabinent this way so what I had to do was take off the controler, pull all the wires back to the cabinent, make a new support arm that was 14 inches longer than stock. I then had to pull the wires back out to the controler. a few of the simple ones had to have a section spliced onto them so they would reach. I used solder and shrink tube to ensure a good connection. Fortunatly, The video and data cables had plenty of length to spare. Now with this setup I put 2 to 5 gallons of collant a minute to the tool and run it like hell. I also stepped this machine up to 6000 rpm and 400 inches per minute on the rapids. All that I need to do now is get a tool changer for it. I did leave room for one in the future. I did totally scrap all the sheet metal the machine came with and started from scratch with fresh 14 gauge cold roll sheet and some various size bar and tube for the internal door tracks, support for stiffness and window tracks. I made aluminum placards for the front of the machine to replace the "TM-1" logo sticker that I no longer had.

Hi AMCTony,

Another really nice enclosure.

Boy! That coolant pump is a real gusher. Looks like a miniature fire hose. You must have a pretty large coolant tank to recover and recycle that amount of coolant. Nice job. You mentioned that you wired the coolant pump into the machine. Can you turn it on and off with the associated "M" codes? It so, that is really neat. You must have found a schematic or looked at a friends machine that had the factory coolant pump option. Either way you really did a nice job.

John

PS. I passed the spindle and feed speedup information that I saw here on the CNC Zone along to a friend of mine here in Florida and he was extremely happy to get that information as it added a new dimension to his TM-1 machine.

AMCTony, great job, I have the same problems ( coolant bath, short controll pedant, tool changer ) but I have the auger :) , recently I ask myself : change the machine or build covers and TC, but for the first one is no money and for the second I search for the sense, but You gived me a little chope :) can You post more photos of your new covers ? I really like them, thanks.

The Coolant is hooked into the regular system plug with M08 for on and M09 for off like usual. I had to order 2 wires from haas to jump from board to board in the machine. The P/N is the same on my TL-2 that has coolant so I just ordered these parts and used them on my TM-1. The pump is 115v and the plug is 230V so I just wired it to use 1 leg of the plug. I have been using it like this for around a year with no issues at all. The control just uses a solid state relay to switch a 230V Circuit so there should be no problem doing this. I built a coolant tank that holds 25 gallons and that seems to be enough to keep the thing well fed. I am posting some crude .dwg's of the cabinent. I never intended them to be used for anyone else but me so they are crude but they are 1 to 1 and dimensions can be easily placed on them.

Remember that the control support arm will need lengthened by around 14 inches. This requires complete removal of the controler and a little soldering. Not really a big deal but this may be uneasy for some people.

Here is a dwg for the name plates. You can use these to get printed stickers made or make fancy engraved aluminum plates like I did.

thanks !! that will be very helpfull , try to build or buy a programmable coolant ;-) it is very helpfull , how do you think to get a ATC ? build your own or buy from haas ?

amctony,i started to build enclosure also and im almost finished,how did you bump up your rapids and rpms?did you have to pay hass service to do this?
thanks,steve

you need to change a few parameters only , you don`t need to call service , all this have been described allready at this forum, just search for it .

I would just buy the tool changer from Haas. With something like that I would want as few issues as possible.