G-10 Question

[Janos]

I'm probably on the wrong forum to ask this question, but I use Haas anyhow. I have ran G-10 in the past and I ALWAYS use coolant to keep the dust down and to help with getting rid of the heat so my parts wont delaminate. We have recently gotten a new person in the shop (which is higher up the food chain) that hand wrote a pretty simple program for an operator. He told him directly not to use coolant. I have always been told that this stuff is almost as bad as asbestos. And that it should never be ran dry for the health of the people running it. I would like input from all of you. The new guy said he looked at the MSDS and it was "ok".

[Geof]

G10 is glass reinforced epoxy, aka fiberglass.

It is not quite as bad as asbestos I think but most certainly the dust should not be inhaled and constant skin contact is not a good idea; here is some information.

http://www.hughesbros.com/Fiberglass%20MSDS.pdf

[Janos]

Just for the sake of safety I believe I'll just keep the coolant on it anyhow. Thanks for the info link.

John

[Donkey Hotey]

I'm curious what you guys do to filter the coolant. We recently outsourced a bunch of G10 work. They ran it dry, with a shop vac to suck up the dust.

With our new machines that just arrived, we're going to be insourcing that work. I'd hate to contaminate 95 gallons of coolant with the fibers.

[Geof]

Originally Posted by Donkey Hotey .......With our new machines that just arrived, we're going to be insourcing that work. I'd hate to contaminate 95 gallons of coolant with the fibers.

Get some cheap domestic water cartridge filters similar to what have been discussed in other posts; two or four in parallel should take out the fibers.


EDIT: Or you can try one of these: http://www.kellerproducts.net/inline_bag_filter.htm

[Donkey Hotey]

I'm worried that the filter media won't be fine enough to trap the fibers. No? We might actually be able to justify the Haas canister filter (bag type). I don't know if that's any better or not.

We're also going to be dealing with carbon fiber composite. Same issues.

[Geof]

Keller Products bag filters go down to 1 micron.

I did some Googling and found this:
A carbon fiber is a long, thin strand of material about 0.0002-0.0004 in (0.005-0.010 mm) in diameter and composed mostly of carbon atoms....

So they should work.

I think glass fibers are much larger.

[dertsap]

Originally Posted by Donkey Hotey I'm curious what you guys do to filter the coolant. We recently outsourced a bunch of G10 work. They ran it dry, with a shop vac to suck up the dust. With our new machines that just arrived, we're going to be insourcing that work. I'd hate to contaminate 95 gallons of coolant with the fibers.

running dry creates too much smoke plus I found it's better on tooling to run it wet, but be prepared for a contaminated machine if you run wet , I highly doubt filtration will work because even the simple screens on the machines get clogged , filters will be cooked with no time at all , the stuff will work its way thru and even plug up the coolant lines , Ive run plenty of the stuff on a few different machines and had the same issues of struggling to keep the coolant flowing , it may help to create screened baffles that the coolant has to flow thru , starting with a coarse screen then eventually getting finer .
its nasty filthy itchy stinky stuff but other than that its great to work with

[Janos]

Call me lazy but If I know I going to be running the stuff I leave a pile of chips in the pan from the last run to catch the bis stuff and just put some polyfil batting in the pan. That does a pretty good job. A little still gets by but at least it doesn't turn to mud in the sump.

[Mic6]

Heck yes run coolant. Running dry is just gross, and hazardous. Even with a shop vac, you still smell it and fell it on your skin. I like to leave the previus chips in the pan also, which is already on top of a layer of terry cloth rags. If you're doing alot of g-10, it will clog the pan up quick and start flowing over, but just change the rags, it will catch alot of it.