dealing with lathe chips

[JackOfDiamonds]

I have a lathe in my small shop and occasionally I turn a lot of metal. Like take a 3-pound chunk of aluminum and machine it down to 1/4 pound.

I hear a lot about lathe techniques but nobody seems to talk about what they do with the chips. It seems to be left out of all the tool manuals, how-to guides, and so on. But I don't have a problem using the lathe I'm having more problems managing the chips.

In the perfect world, all the chips would break into little tiny pieces that would all fall into the chip tray and I could sweep up and vacuum up with my shop vac. That's nice but then the tiny chips also fall into the chuck and jam up the jaws. I try to take the jaws out and brush the chips out, but this takes forever.

In the real world, especially with chromoly, some of the chips come off in long pieces that clog up the shop-vac. These are sharp enough to shred bare hands.

My "system" so far is to do nothing until the chips start piling up where they are a risk of getting sucked into the chuck. Then I put on mechanix gloves and pick out the big stringy chips first, then vacuum the smaller ones. There's always some medium-size ones lurking in the small ones though, which clog up the shop vac hose without fail. I don't really know what to do with the big stringy ones so I try to put them in their own hefty bag and put them out with the trash. It's not worth trying to scrap them at my scale.

Am I doing something wrong? The fact that people don't talk about chips very much makes me think it must be less of a problem for other lathe users. I know I can manipulate the chip size with my feed and feed settings. But I haven't even decided if I want to deal with small chips or big chips.

 

[whateg01]

You want to avoid long stringy steel. If it gets into a birds nest it can make a mess of you. It can be difficult, especially in a home shop, to find the feed, speed, tool geometry combination to break the chips.

For steel, I keep a magnet to pick up as much as I can before it gets embedded in my shoes. I don't worry about aluminum as much but I do try to sweep them up before they get tracked around if I can. At work they put a rug outside the doors of all the carpeted areas with signs up wipe your feet before coming in.

 

[solo machinist]

I've been in a machine shop most of my life, There's no magic way to clean up.
It's always been a pain. At home I pick out the long stuff and vacuum with a large hose.
Leave the shoes out of the house,

 

[MiteyF]

The obvious first choice, as I'm sure you know, is to break your chip. Deeper cuts with higher feed rates. Obviously, not always an option.

Big ol' stick welding gloves are the best for cleaning long gnarly stringers out of the bed.

Get yourself a 55 gallon drum for chips, and skip the shop vac in favor of a dust pan and hand brush.

 

[jfleisher]

I keep an old pair of shoes in the shop for when I am using the lathe, so I don’t track chips upstairs. Regular use of the shop vac and stopping to remove the stringy ones is my system. I prefer to turn brass, it doesn’t get stringy.

 

[macgyver37]

I am not one to be safety first on much of anything to be honest, but when I was working in a machine shop, one of the guys running a horizontal boring mill was pulling chips with some long handled needle nose pliers and a long stringy chip wrapped his hand up and he ended up losing his index finger. I get a little paranoid with the lathe and long chips due to that.

If it comes down to it, hand feed the roughing passes and pause the feed when the chips get any length to them if you can't rework your cutter geometry to produce a good chip. From what I recall, chromoly isn't going to break a chip very easily.

 

[RoninB4]

This may sound stupid but do you even have a chip breaker as part of the cutting bit? If using HSS it has to be an integral part of the geometry. If using carbide inserts the tool holder should have a small disc/pad/triangle clamped to the top of the insert. If your tool holder doesn't have one then that's why it cost less than other tool holders. As others have posted, the feed and DOC need to be just right per the material, that's not always possible/convenient. The other post about a large steel drum for chips is good advice, that's what most shops use. Heavy leather welding gloves is a good suggestion. Extracting chips while the lathe is running is NEVER a good idea.

To keep chips out of the chuck you can use some tape across the jaw ways. You could also machine some inserts for the ways with set screws to lock them in place but that's a lot more involved. Tape works for me but I don't spend all day at the lathe either.

 

[slowtwitch73]

Gloves and a bucket/trash can for the big stuff... then shop vac.

 

[cmandp]

I don't usually do lots of hogging off of material. But I usually clean up as I go. Take a cut if there are enough that chips are long stringy I clean up before the next cut. It keeps chips from building up on the part which ruin surface finish or on the carriage near the (spinning) part that can get caught and start whipping around.

I don't touch metal chips with my hands (we all forget this and still get cut occasionally) but pick them up with pliers or gloves. We had cut resistant water proof gloves in the machine shop I worked it, the chips were soaked in coolant. I was taught to roll the stringy chips up into a nest or ball. This was mostly 17-4PH so very stringy in H1150 condition.

Like Ronin says, never touch chips while machine is running. They can get caught in the spinning part or chuck and **** your hand in. Really bad with metal chips, like amputate bad. I had a coworker on 2nd shift try and take chips out of a CNC lathe while it was running. It made a rapid to reposition for the next tool and impaled his hand with multiple tools against the spindle.

For plastic I usually get the cut started and have the vacuum handy. Then I just let the vacuum **** the whole string in one piece. Those are easy to clean up as they aren't usually sharp or stabby.

 

[slodat]

I often break stringy chips by momentarily stopping and restarting the feed. On the Pacemaker this is a lever I throw. I avoid bird nest getting big enough to wrap around the chuck. I keep the chip pan free of chip piles so they can’t raise up through the bed.

On my Okuma CNC lathe, I let it rip and clean out as they accumulate. For vacuuming, I use a dust deputy on a shop vac. I’m about to pull the tigger on a Freddy, but that’s probably not home shop guy stuff.

If you feed aluminum deep enough and fast enough it will break a chip. Keep your nose radius small to help with this.

Like others said above, chips are a pain in the ***. Don’t grab them with your bare hands and don’t interact with them while the spindle is turning.

 

[ez-duzit]

I collect the chips in a bucket until it is full, then bag it for disposal. While running the lathe I use a fish hook removing tool to capture the stringy ones.

 

[solo machinist]

I collect the chips in a bucket until it is full, then bag it for disposal. While running the lathe I use a fish hook removing tool to capture the stringy ones.

What a great ideal.

 

[whateg01]

I collect the chips in a bucket until it is full, then bag it for disposal. While running the lathe I use a fish hook removing tool to capture the stringy ones.

If I was going to use that on or around a running machine, I would first remove the lanyard.

 

[alfadan]

I tried an experiment a while back. On stringy 6061, I used my tool to score a ~50mil groove with the carriage in the stock along the length of cut.
This provided enough interruption to break the chip. As DOC got past the groove, I scored another groove.
I don't really bother with a chip breaker and was just fooling around, but it did help.

 

[ez-duzit]

If I was going to use that on or around a running machine, I would first remove the lanyard.

That is a generic photo off the net.

 

[Bill T]

The chips are the main reason I can't keep a shop dog. (I miss the dog!!!!!).