coolant questions

[truckmann4x4]

I currently use liquid ice coolant in 4 HAAS mills and 1 HASS lathe. I was approached by a Hangsterfer coolant salesman and I wanted some opinions on a good coolant. We arent too busy of a shop so some machines dont run every week. Any good sugestions/experiences?

[PixMan]

Well, which of their products was he pushing? Full synthetic, semi-synthetic, or water-soluble oil? What materials do you run?

Sounds like you need long sump life for one thing, but other factors include your budget, materials you run, operations on that work, and disposal costs.

I've got a home-shop environment, and have a manual lathe. To say it doesn't run every day would be a gross understatement....it sits for weeks without running coolant. I'm using the Valenite ValCool VP-Tech semi-synthetic. It's fairly inexpensive (fits my budget, which is thin to say the least), and has incredible sump life. It's been in there a year and still looks like the day I put it in. I run anything that falls in the door, from aluminum to brass to steel and stainless. The VP-Tech works great on everything, and doesn't stain.

[davereagan]

I've never had a synthetic that was any good for tapping and I've tried a few. If you want to do tapping with flood coolant and you're leaning toward synthetic, make sure he specifically guanrantees is to work. I once used Missile Lube which is vegetable based by Hangsterfer's. It was a great fluid, just expensive.

[PixMan]

I've never used any coolant for tapping other than straight cutting oil that was in the CNC Swiss machines I ran. I have a bottle of ValTap for that at home.

Some coolants today have EP additives (chlorinated ones are that, for instance) and are OK for tapping, but there's always going to be a compromise in using low-viscosity coolants in place of high-viscosity cutting fluids.

Tapping, especially with form taps, is such a high-pressure operation that in the low-volume shop it's just safer to use a task-specific tapping fluid. If you're in a high-production environment and need to do a lot of tapping in-cycle, I'd recommend a chlorinated soluble oil coolant over any synthetic or semi-synthetic.