How do You Clean Out Your Lathe Chip Tray?

[erikmannie]

OK, enough of slicing up my hands. I have a medium/large chip tray underneath my lathe that has chips of all sizes, DRO cables & coolant.

I don’t want to throw away my coolant. I could use a square plastic scoop, but then how do I save my coolant?

The ideal solution would be a scoop with holes that would allow my CF to drain out.

The DRO cables are tough; I am not worried about damaging them.

I will post some cheap ideas here, but I’m wondering how you guys do it. I know that bare hands don’t work.

 

[erikmannie]

This wouldn’t be terrible. One could drill a lot of holes or slots in the dustpan.

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Another idea would be to fabricate one.

 

[erikmannie]

This one looks good. You could use the whisk to sweep the chips into the dustpan. It would need holes drilled for my purposes.

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[DavidR8]

What about a restaurant size slotted metal spoon and a metal colander?

 

[erikmannie]

What about a restaurant size slotted metal spoon and a metal colander?

I am going to raid the kitchen now; the price is right. We’ll see if the girls notice them missing.

 

[erikmannie]

These look good enough to try, but apparently these are not available to me.



A spatula would be good, too.

 

[Ken226]

OK, enough of slicing up my hands. I have a medium/large chip tray underneath my lathe that has chips of all sizes, DRO cables & coolant.

I don’t want to throw away my coolant. I could use a square plastic scoop, but then how do I save my coolant?

The ideal solution would be a scoop with holes that would allow my CF to drain out.

The DRO cables are tough; I am not worried about damaging them.

I will post some cheap ideas here, but I’m wondering how you guys do it. I know that bare hands don’t work.

I'm not sure what kind of chip pan you have, but perhaps modify to a slide out type chip drawer. With a grate/filter and coolant drain.

I recently modified mine by cutting out the bottom, and riveting in some c channel around the perimeter of the hole.

The underside of the c channel take a slide out chip drawer, which I purchased from grizzly.

The chip drawer was 200$ from the grizzly G0709 14x40 parts manual. My lathe is a Birmingham 13x40.





You can just see the grates drain in the right rear corner of the drawer.





The whole stand assembly is out being powder coated in smoke gray right now. I should have it back sometime this week.

The coolant drains from the drawer into a sump in the right lathe pedestal. I clean the chips out with a shop vac.

 

[markba633csi]

How about one of those cat litter scoops? Kinda shovel-shaped with a bunch of slots
-Mark

 

[benmychree]

How about one of those cat litter scoops? Kinda shovel-shaped with a bunch of slots
-Mark

That is just what I was going to suggest! Om my lathe, I just let it drain into the sump, then use a sort of wide shallow hoe to drag the chips and crud out; to me, a chip pan does not need to be surgically clean, just free from mounds of chips, this can be way overdone.

 

[slodat]

My chips birds nest so bad I just grab the huge pile all at once.

I've seen some 3d printed chip scoops that look like they work well.