Containing The Mess....

[HimyKabibble]

I have a BP clone, which I use for some fairly heavy milling on aluminum, so it throws chips *everywhere*. I would desperately like to find a better way of containing the mess. Has anyone come up with a decent solution for containing the mess, short of huge box enclosing the entire machine? It is, of course easy to enclose the front and sides of the table, but the back is another matter entirely. As I use every inch of the available travels in all axes, I cannot afford to lose any range. The biggest problems are:

1) Closing off the back of the table in such a way that the enclosure is tall enough to contain the chips when milling tall items (for me, this means a barrier about 16" high), but is not in the way when milling close to the table, especially when the cut is very close to, or even over-hanging slightly, the back edge of the table (I have to do this quite a lot). The trick here is the rear barrier must somehow accomodate a range of perhaps 5-16", to handle milling different heights of material, without interfering with the bottom side of the head or ram.

2) Having some means of keeping chips from piling up on the Y ways behind the table, causing, at some point, a loss of motion. All I've come up with is a separate air nozzle that blows continuously on that area.

The only potential solutions I've come up with so far are:

1) Have rigid barriers on the front and sides of the table, and a flexible barrier stretched across the back of the table, such that it can move out of the way when needed. But I have yet to figure out a practical way of accomplishing this....

2) Have a hinged sheet-metal barrier 4-5" tall, with the hinge running along the back edge of the table, so that it moves to a vertical position when the table is close to the Z ways, and falls back to about a 45 degree angle at other times. The hinged barrier would be supplanted by a flexible barrier above, to extend up to the required 16" or so inches.

3) Enclose the entire travel space of the table, so the chips fall down basically around the knee/saddle, and are collected below. This has the obvious disadvantage of requireing a HUGE enclosure (machine is a 9x49 with 34"x14" X/Y travels).

I would like to be able to use flood coolant, but don't want to deal with a wet floor.

What have others done?

Regards,
Ray L.

[gus]

What I did on my cnc bridgeports was full sheet of plastic on each side down to the coolant pan, and a guard mounted on each end of the table[actually used the original mounts for the original enclosure in the t slots] Since I always run 2 vises, I had a sheet of plexi, 10 inches high with 4 holes drilled where the outer vice jaw mounting holes are and popped it on studs screwed in those holes.

in essence you have the table accounting for 3 sides and large plastic sheets accounting for the back. even with a way guard you have to blow off the y axis ways

[jthornton]

I gave up after trying for years to contain the mess on my BP knee mill and bought a VMC that was enclosed.

I just keep a shop vac near the BP out of the way but ready for instant use. I use the smaller hose about 1 1/2" diameter and use loc line with regulated air and a magnetic mount to keep the chips out of the cutting area.

John