How do You Clean Out Your Lathe Chip Tray?

I made a drip tray from SS sheet to catch the coolant and drain back to the tank. I use a magnetic pickup rod. Then my gloved hands for the non magnetic material. Finally a shopvac.
 
I clean the chip tray out when it's around three quarters full. Slide chip tray out, drive loader tractor in shop and use a scoop shovel. This is about every three weeks.
Usually three or four loader buckets full. Oh it's a American pacemaker.
Scruffy Ron in ohio
 
I use the following method to handle lathe swarf - there's a 4" diameter hole in the chip pan at the back. A "toilet flange" is bolted underneath the chip pan and a 5 gllon bucket hangs below that.
kHPIM0552.jpg

Note the two diagonal lines on the chip pan. These "guide lines" continue to the front. I use a custom-made brush, modified from something like the one @erikmannie cited, to push swarf toward the hole from the front of the lathe. The hook on the end of the handle lets me hang the brush from the front lip of the chip tray.
kHPIM0550.jpg

PS - these photos don't represent the normal state of things. I'd taken the back board/splash guard (previously mounted to the 2x4 visible in the first photo) off the lathe to install a new DRO. While I was at it I cleaned up the chip pan. It normally sports a nice coating of oil(s), and even after "cleaning." has a light dusting of chips and other debris, especially in the corners.

As for the original intent of erikmannie's posting, I suppose a system like mine is not ideal for flood coolant, but might be adapted. The 5 gallon bucket could be used as a "crap trap" by adding an overflow that leads to the coolant reservoir.
 
The other day, I grabbed my worst pair of welding gloves and used those to grab the bulk of the chips.

When I got down to the small, oily chips (my CF is oil), I used a whisk to whisk everything over to where the drain is. As the CF slowly drained, my still gloved hands removed maximum chips with minimum CF.

This was messy and took a long time, but the results were great. This is what I will continue to do until I can afford to implement one of the ideas in this thread.

Interesting sidenote: our garbage can that goes out on the curb has a crack in it & there are oily CF puddles where we store the garbage can & on the street. My wife was not too pleased with this development as I was also blamed for causing the crack in the garbage can “when I threw some big piece of metal in there”.
 
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erikmannie said:
The other day, I grabbed my worst pair of welding gloves and used those to grab the bulk of the chips.

When I got down to the small, oily chips (my CF is oil), I used a whisk to whisk everything over to where the drain is. As the CF slowly drained, my still gloved hands removed maximum chips with minimum CF.

This was messy and took a long time, but the results were great. This is what I will continue to do until I can afford to implement one of the ideas in this thread.

Interesting sidenote: our garbage can that goes out on the curb has a crack in it & there are oily CF puddles where we store the garbage can & on the street. My wife was not too pleased with this development as I was also blamed for causing the crack in the garbage can “when I threw some big piece of metal in there”.
Click to expand...
You need to make something nice for her....

JOhn
 
Did you kindly point out the flaw in her argument and explain to her that you don't throw away big pieces of metal, that they get saved for future projects?
 
Two overlapping cookie sheets...pull them out together and tip into a plastic bag inside a cardboard box. Then I brush up what's left, wipe off the trays, back to work. At some point I'll have to replace the bag in the box, which is an unanswered question.

Tim
 
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