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Comment by soheil | Hacker News Reader

Pretty epic. But doesn't it need constant lubrication for the head not to get too warm?

Yes! Most CNC setups will flood the cutting area with coolant. It moderates tool temperature and also helps carry away chips.

The machines have filters to recover and recycle the coolant. They might also have augurs to carry chips out of the machine.

The coolant can be topped up periodically between shifts as needed, when the waste chips are collected.

At scale, these things can be automated even further. For medium sized shops it's easy to pay someone for a couple hours of labor to do it every few days.

Typically only when cutting metal. And harder metal especially. Wood and the like will often have an spray of air directed at the cutting bit but thats simply to help clear away chips and clean the cutting surface. Helps keep a nice finish and good visibility.

Actually, it's a little different. Using coolant is the norm even when doing mild steels. You can remove material quicker, your part remains cooler, and your tools remain cleaner.

There's even cuttings bits that have integral cooling (holes in the cutting surface).

Right--I support a fair number of machine shops and they're all moving to CNC (although they're using a lot manual machines still). 5 axis is nice and there's a surprising amount of manual tooling changes.

We had a problem where one of the integral cooling loops had a tube come off and it sprayed the better part of a 50 gallon drum of coolant all over the shop before someone got over and hit the e-stop.

That sounds correct. Unless you have a sensor, there's no way to make a meaningful detection and decision to stop something.

And sensors that are reliable and durable cost $$$$.

Pretty sure even the mildest steel is still a hard metal. Soft metal would be something like copper or aluminum IIRC. (Or lead or gold, moreso, but you probably wouldn't want to be machining those for obvious reasons.)

Yeah, watch some CNC videos on youtube or whatever! The (usually blue) liquid spraying everywhere is coolant.

Fancier machines will have a hollow spindle and can actually force the coolant through an also-hollow tool, so it emerges right near the cutting face. The simpler approach just uses a nozzle pointed in the general direction of the cutter. In between, there are programmable nozzles....

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