Keeping machines and operators cool and clean

Floor Dry is piled around the base of the machines. Oil drips from the ceiling. Grinding dust collects in your coffee cup. A face full of mist greets you every time you open the machine door. This is the environment in which I learned machining 30 years ago. Back then, new machines were simply set on the floor, plugged in and given a quick leveling. Machine foundations were rare and temperature control was at the whim of whoever operated the loading dock door.

Courtesy of TOMZ

TOMZ Corp. has invested at least $150,000 in equipment to improve air quality, including this air filtration system. The investment returns about $5,000 a week in reclaimed cutting oil.

Shops today are more aware of environmental conditions. Mist collectors and electrostatic air cleaners are not uncommon and many manufacturers realize there’s little chance of attracting high-caliber work from customers when the shop is a pigsty. Many also recognize that proper environmental controls and a good machine foundation are important to accuracy—that holding a few tenths tolerance or imparting a mirror finish is all but impossible if the floor shakes like Elvis Presley every time the Union Pacific rumbles past.

But the sad truth remains that there are still too many shops ignoring air quality, temperature and machine isolation. This is bad for machines, their operators, part quality and, ultimately, the bottom line.

Take a Deep Breath

Let’s start with air quality. Royal Products, Hauppauge, N.Y., has sold the Filtermist product for more than 30 years, yet Tom Sheridan, vice president of marketing, estimates fewer than 25 percent of machine tools have a mist containment system. “We’re still amazed at the number of people who approach us at trade shows who had no idea there are products available to take care of the mist and smoke generated by machine tools,” he said.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is partly to blame. The same people who mandate steel-toed boots and ear protection apparently don’t get too excited about shop air quality. “OSHA offers a guideline of 5 mg of particulate matter per cubic meter of air, but there are no actual regulations,” Sheridan said.

Lung damage, slippery floors, fire hazards, lost cutting fluid—there are many good reasons to keep air clean. Sheridan recommends exchanging the air inside a machine enclosure five times each minute. That might cost a few thousand dollars on a typical 8 ” (203mm) CNC lathe or 20 “×40 ” (0.5m × 1m) machining center. Too much money? Think about profits. “We’ve actually found shops where the operators were dialing back the speeds and feeds to reduce the amount of mist being produced,” he said.

Production efficiency aside, human help is a shop’s most important asset. “Some shops use climate control as a way of attracting good talent,” Sheridan said. “They want to give their employees a comfortable, healthy place to work.”

Courtesy of Royal Products

A Royal Filtermist removes mist on a Haas CNC lathe.

Scott Hilton, project manager at Machine Specialties Inc., a contract machining and metal finishing company in Whitsett, N.C., said he’s the person to call if you need something, so when MSI’s original owner called him 20 years ago and said he wanted his shop to look like a place people would want to work, Hilton got busy.

Over the years, he’s covered the floors with 3⁄16 “-thick epoxy and beefed up the HVAC systems, including installation of several air filtration units from Sanford, N.C-based Trion Air Purification Systems. “We have two types of air cleaners,” he said. “For the Swiss CNC lathes, we have electrostatic precipitators for oil and smoke. On the mills and other machines that run water-soluble coolant, we use Trion’s HEPA-equipped Air Boss systems.”

Hilton said the shop’s “eat-off-the-floor” cleanliness has attracted new customers, made machine maintenance easier and reduced operating costs, saving the company $20,000 annually in recovered cutting fluid. “We have 57 CNC machines—Swiss lathes, multipallet horizontals, 5-axis vertical machining centers and so on, running 24/7,” he said. “We do aerospace and medical work, and our customers expect the shop to be clean. But, just as importantly, this is our facility and that’s how we want it to be. It’s a mindset.”

Here Comes the Sun

Another shop with that mindset is Berlin, Conn.-based TOMZ Corp., a manufacturer of medical and aerospace components and customer of machine supplier Methods Machine Tools Inc., Sudbury, Mass. TOMZ Vice President Tom Matulaniec explained that, like MSI, it has installed electrostatic air cleaners for its machine tools, ducting them to a centralized unit. “We’ve easily invested $150,000 or more on air quality,” he said. “Aside from providing clean air, that investment probably returns nearly $5,000 a week in reclaimed cutting oil.”

Courtesy of TOMZ

TOMZ air-conditions its shop to a consistent temperature of 72° to 74° F (22° to 23° C) year round and installed 4 ‘×8 ‘ (1.2m × 2.4m) windows along the roofline to bring in natural light.

The company also air-conditions its shop to a consistent temperature of 72° to 74° F (22° to 23° C) year round. Matulaniec said: “We hold tenths on some of our jobs. Even with the constant air temperature, you still have to let the machines warm up after they’ve been sitting all weekend. And we’ve noticed that the machine closest to the shipping area gets a little cranky if you open the loading door, especially in the wintertime. Temperature is critical with tolerances this tight.”

In addition to its investment in air-temperature and quality control, TOMZ recognizes the human side of the equation, installing 4 ‘×8 ‘ (1.2m × 2.4m) windows along the roofline to bring in natural light. “We have guys out there working 10 or 11 hours a day,” Matulaniec said. “For much of the year, they clock in when it’s dark and go home when it’s dark. The windows make the environment a little better for everyone.”

Despite the tight tolerances, Matulaniec said TOMZ has not seen the need for special machine foundations. Until recently, that is. “We have all of our equipment bolted to the floor,” he said. “This is primarily to maintain alignment and keep it from moving around. We never had any trouble with vibration, then this week the city began repaving the street next to our building. You can feel it in the floor, and the machines can feel it too. We haven’t been able to run any close-tolerance work since they started doing that.”

Shake it Up

Keith Leatherwood, vice president of sales at Vibro/Dynamics Corp., Broadview, Ill., which has manufactured machine mounts and vibration isolators since 1964, has a solution to Matulaniec’s problem: pour a slab. “Standard production floors are designed to support the weights of people, racks, tables and forklifts, not machine tools,” he said. “A true machine foundation can support a much higher load in a smaller area.”