What Did You Buy Today?

pontiac428 said:
Small lathes could really benefit from this motor. Easy to fit, and it has coarse steps as well as fine sweep on the speed controller.
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Yeah, with machine tools is when you lower RPM you typically want more torque. This should give full torque at stalled.

I was looking at all the options. Current lathe motor nameplate is buried, but I think it's 1HP. Having variable speed is what I'm really after here. This lathe is 4 position stepped pulley with a back gear for low speeds.

One more upgrade on the list of upgrades.
 
Boxes from the Langmuir Crossfire Plasma Table order are starting to arrive... I want this setup to be self-contained. Ordered the following to have a way to maintain the coolant in the table. I will need to make a shelf on the bottom of the table to accommodate all this.

I will have an 8 gallon ATV spot sprayer tank (with 12volt pump) on a shelf at the bottom of the table, to drain and fill the table.
Replacing the small drain that comes with the table, for 1-1/2" a stainless steel basket strainer
Stainless steel 50 micron mesh to place inside the strainer to better filter the water
Plasma Cut - Green Coolant - Table and CNC Cutting Coolant - 1 gallon - I do not want to deal with mixing this and that to avoid rust. This is a proven solution.
I have a spare motorcycle battery that I will use to power this... or use a 12 volt power supply to power the pump.
Some PVC fittings and pipes to complete the setup... I will get those from the local Lowes...

Everything ordered.


Tank.jpg

Drain.jpg

Coolant.jpg
 
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@wachuko, the table supposedly holds 8 gallons. How big is the reservoir?
I did the deep dive on table coolant, and I think I will use borax (and maybe a small booster of NaOH) for starters, and I'll just paste wax the Langmuir so the splashback doesn't salt up immediately. I plan to drain and dump between uses, and refill using 5 gallon buckets. I'm ready to start cutting test patterns this weekend.

I am curious about how long "green cut" can buffer its pH against CO2 diffusion and oxidation. If it lasts a long time once drained and covered, I'm game to try it. All of the plasma table coolant products use unlisted chemicals, so they can get away with "proprietary" and a totally blank SDS. Makes it hard to know the chemistry when all that the SDS shows is sodium nitrate or a simple surfactant without showing the buffers or stabilizers. Nitrites are not stable in aqueous solution open to the atmosphere, so they're adding something else to conjugate the anion.
 
pontiac428 said:
@wachuko, the table supposedly holds 8 gallons. How big is the reservoir?
I did the deep dive on table coolant, and I think I will use borax (and maybe a small booster of NaOH) for starters, and I'll just paste wax the Langmuir so the splashback doesn't salt up immediately. I plan to drain and dump between uses, and refill using 5 gallon buckets. I'm ready to start cutting test patterns this weekend.

I am curious about how long "green cut" can buffer its pH against CO2 diffusion and oxidation. If it lasts a long time once drained and covered, I'm game to try it. All of the plasma table coolant products use unlisted chemicals, so they can get away with "proprietary" and a totally blank SDS. Makes it hard to know the chemistry when all that the SDS shows is sodium nitrate or a simple surfactant without showing the buffers or stabilizers. Nitrites are not stable in aqueous solution open to the atmosphere, so they're adding something else to conjugate the anion.
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I edited the post with more details and links...

XL table takes from 5-8 gallons of water/coolant - I figured an 8 gallon tank would be enough.

Read about mixed results on use of borax... but my take is that it was user error... just need to keep PH around 9 or above. But I am lazy, that stuff I posted worked for a lot of folks... was lazy and decided just to get that instead of taking out the chemist kit... hehehehe

Also got some of these silicone collapsible funnels to modify and place on the torch to minimize the glare, sparks all over, and splash when in use...

Plasma-1.jpeg

There was also a best practice of parking the torch on a flat surface after the last cut to minimize the splash from the compressed air... rather than parking it over the water/coolant. I hope that makes sense.

EDIT: Here is the video that made me decide not to use Borax


And the tip on the parking location to avoid splash after finishing cut...

 
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wachuko said:
I edited the post with more details and links...

XL table takes from 5-8 gallons of water/coolant - I figured an 8 gallon tank would be enough.

Read about mixed results on use of borax... but my take is that it was user error... just need to keep PH around 9 or above. But I am lazy, that stuff I posted worked for a lot of folks... was lazy and decided just to get that instead of taking out the chemist kit... hehehehe

Also got some of these silicone collapsible funnels to modify and place on the torch to minimize the glare and splash when in use...

View attachment 457212

There was also a best practice of parking the torch on a flat surface after the last cut to minimize the splash from the compressed air... rather than parking it over the water/coolant. I hope that makes sense.

EDIT: Here is the video that made me decide not to use Borax

Click to expand...

I agree that it's all user error. The take-home I got from watching that video 2 months ago is he was leaving his borax water in the tray 24-7, and his attention to detail sucks because he keeps calling it Lang-meyer. He said he keeps it at 8% pH, which is another attention to detail thing that anyone who "gets it" should catch- it's less a verbal typo and more an illustration of his experience level with the chemistry.

While I love to get down low into the weeds while discussing and planning, I have no desire to maintain a complicated system that requires constant attention. I am a practical person, I like practical solutions.

Borax is a good antioxidant that is generally non-corrosive. Surfactants like Micro 90 or even dish soap help water run off and enhances thermal conductivity for cooling. There are dozens of suitable surfactants. Antimicrobials come in many forms, but I like polyquat for general purpose. It's a seriously good one and very neutral- quaternary amines work as electron pumps. Polyquat is also called benzalkonium chloride, and can be bought in the pool and spa section of the hardware store, conveniently right next to pH-UP buffer solution that you will need to adjust pH in your green coolant. All of these chems are cheap.

The one DIY solution that I am the most interested in is sodium nitrite, and the only reason I'm using borax instead is availability. The idjits on the Langmuir forum using curing salts are seriously a quart low on oil. Curing salt is mostly sodium chloride, potassium chloritde, nitrate salts, and nitrite salts- but the nitrite is only about 10%, the rest is effing salt, no good for corrosion prevention. I haven't found a convenient source of sodium nitrite USP by mail ever since that stupid flash in the pan frenzy over kids getting high on bath salts. When you eat nitrite, it bonds to hemoglobin and blocks oxygen. Adults can free the heme with an enzyme called hemoglobin reductase, so it won't kill adults in small amounts, but children don't develop this defense until they are 2-3 years old, so consuming it will make infants turn blue and suffocate.

I might have to look up sodium sulfite as another option, same mechanism, but I need to calc out the change in Gibbs free energy to see what the reaction does in comparison to the partially reduced nitrite.
 
@pontiac428 can benzalkonium chloride be used with weed killers to adjust the pH of water being mixed in?

My local farm store quite caring pH adjusters that came in a surfactant. I can order out of state but shipping is a killer as you are experiencing.
 
Gnpenning said:
@pontiac428 can benzalkonium chloride be used with weed killers to adjust the pH of water being mixed in?

My local farm store quite caring pH adjusters that came in a surfactant. I can order out of state but shipping is a killer as you are experiencing.
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If by that you mean the pH UP to raise pH, then yes, absolutely. Or washing soda. It's a compatible buffer and will "activate" glyphosate, for example. It won't do jack for 2,4-D though, so it depends on the mechanism the herbicide uses. But Round-up derivatives, definitely.

The benzalkonium chloride/polyquat is the antimicrobial, to prevent algae, fungus, and caca funky stank.
 
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