Found out that coolant pH dropping below 8.5 wrecked my inserts in half the time

3 comments

3 Comments

Wait, the pump was grinding itself up and feeding metal through the whole system? That's insane. Makes chasing pH sound totally pointless if your machine is literally eating itself.

sean_torres7118d ago

Yeah, I'm gonna call this one. Coolant pH dropping a bit under 8.5 and your inserts are dying twice as fast? That sounds more like a coolant management issue than a pH thing. Like, if your coolant is that far out of whack, you've probably got bigger problems going on anyway - maybe contamination or bacterial growth that's doing the real damage. I've seen guys run coolant all kinds of sour and their tooling still holds up fine if they're changing it regular. I'm not saying pH doesn't matter, but blaming inserts wearing out on a half point drop feels like looking at the wrong cause.

drew_bennett2418d ago

Hang on, @sean_torres71, you're making a good point about contamination, but I think we're all missing the real sneaky culprit here. What if the pH drop isn't the root cause, but a side effect of something else completely? Like, what if the coolant pump or lines are starting to corrode or break down, and that's dumping metal particles into the mix? That would eat up your inserts way faster than just sour coolant, and it would also pull the pH down a bit because of all that junk in there. I've seen a setup where the sump itself was rusting out, and the operator was chasing pH all day while his tool life kept going downhill. It ended up being a bad pump seal that was grinding up and sending grit through the whole system. So before you blame the pH or the coolant management, maybe check if your machine is literally chewing itself up and feeding the chips to your tooling.