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Question about coolant sump cleaning after a bad weekend at the shop
We had a job running over the weekend on our old Haas VF2, a big batch of aluminum parts. Came in Monday morning and the whole place smelled like rotten eggs, which was new (and awful). The coolant sump was basically a swamp, and the tramp oil had built up so much it was like a thick skin on top. The machine had been running for about 48 hours straight, and the heat plus the fine chips just let the bacteria go wild. I spent half a day just cleaning it out, and we had to scrap the last 20 parts because the finish was ruined from the dirty coolant. Now I set a phone reminder to check the sump and skim the oil every Friday before I leave, no matter what. Has anyone else had a crash course in sump maintenance the hard way, and what's your cleaning routine?
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alice_palmer201mo ago
Rotten egg smell is the worst, it gets in your clothes. I started using a little coolant tester to check the mix and pH every week too, catches problems before they get that bad.
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blake3221mo ago
Ugh, that smell is burned into my memory. After my own swamp disaster, I got one of those little floating oil skimmers that runs all the time. It pulls off the worst of the oil layer automatically. I still do a full clean-out every couple months, but that skimmer stopped the weekend science projects.
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