Thru-spindle coolant & maintenance

[Ydna]

Hello forum, I'm looking for any random tidbits of advise anybody might have regarding the transition to a machine using through-spindle coolant. We have it on order so I'm buying supplies at the moment.

Thus far I've heard a lot of advise about keeping the coolant concentration better in check. A friend of mine suggested running a higher concentration in the tank because it was better on the spindle's coolant coupling, but I was wondering if the higher concentration would lead to foaming.
(I don't play around with the concentrations much since what we have does the job, so I only know enough to be dangerous there)

Prior to now we don't really monitor the coolant quality, rather just "play it by ear". I have an optical refractometer at home so I figure I can use that to start.

Thanks for any info!

[underthetire]

What pressure?

Might want to have some anti foam around, just in case.

[Ydna]

just the standard 300-psi version, nothing too exciting, but still a step up for us Being it's a brand new machine I want to do things right from the beginning.

[murphdog]

Ydna,
If you do much deep hole drilling you will wonder how you got by without TSC before. We drill 4-6" deep in cast iron on some products we manufacture. TSC is awsome compared to p-cool. We have TSC on a 2008
VF4. After a year of running we decided to change the rag filter. The "flow meter" on top of the filter was still in the green but we thought the filter probably needed changing. After changing we noticed a loss of flow at the tool. Looked at the filter several times and it looked ok. Seemed to be fine without the filter. Pump flow was checked & ok. After pulling the filter can off several times we finally caught a colapsed filter. After that we installed a real pressure gage on the input side of the filter and another on the output side of ther filter. The output gage was plumbed & put right above the right side of the right front door. Hindsight being what it is we should have mounted both gages there so we could moniter both sides of the filter from an operators point of view.
The only downside to TSC is the cost of tools, but I think they are worth it.
Murphdog

[Ydna]

Cool, yeah I read about a few other people that have installed gauges on the filer's feed so I'd like to do the same thing. I do a lot of small production batches where the work envelope is full of 30-40 small parts with a 2-3 hour cycle time, naturally I'd like to keep those operations going smoothly as much as possible...