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Old timer at the trade school told me to always check my coolant concentration with a refractometer instead of just eyeballing it
Ignored him for two years until I blew through 14 drill bits in one shift on a batch of 6061 aluminum, turns out my coolant was basically water at 2% concentration and the shop foreman chewed me out for $400 in tooling waste has anyone else had a coolant ratio issue wreck their day?
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wendygrant9d ago
Right there with you. I ran a batch of stainless steel parts for a side job and didn't check my coolant for like three months. It was basically green water at that point and I ended up chattering through a finish pass on a $200 part. The customer wasn't happy and I had to eat the whole thing. Now I check my coolant every Monday morning without fail, learned that lesson the hard way.
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abbychen9d ago
Honestly I used to think it was overblown how often people said to check coolant, like how bad could it really get? But seeing you lose a $200 part over something that takes 30 seconds to check totally flipped my thinking on that. Now I'm paranoid about it too, definitely not a risk worth taking for anyone running a shop.
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