Making My Own Kool Mist System For Lathe And Mill

Project:
Making a cooling system for my metal lathe and mill

Difficulty Level (Easy, Medium, Hard, Insane):
Medium

Process:
As I've been turning some more substantial projects lately I've often had to resort to cooling down my work piece with compressed air before taking proper measurements. Also, the use of cutting oil - although it works great - created quite a bit of smoke in the shop so I wanted to switch to an alternate means of cooling/lubricating my work piece and tooling.

After doing some research I found a bunch of people who used the misting type cooling system (as opposed to the flood coolant). Since my shop usually is below 0 in the winter when I'm not using it I wanted to stay away from the flood coolant so I decided to us a $15 all-house water filter housing that I found on kijiji as a starting point.

Also, I had picked up a whole bunch of different industrial parts at an auction a few months ago, one of which was a fluid level gauge which, mounted to the filter housing, would give me a quick and easy way to see how much coolant I had left.

The first thing I did after ordering a bunch of 1/4" quick connectors on ebay was to clamp the filter housing on my milling table and mill a nice and straight/flat piece down alongside the filter housing so I could mount the fluid level gauge. Then I drilled some holes and mounted the gauge.

Next thing I had to tap a thread on the inside of the lid to mount a quick connector and then a 8" piece of 1/4" vinyl hose as the fluid sucker-upper.

After that came a chunk of 1" teflon I cut, drilled and tapped as a sort of pneumatic manifold to direct one part into the filter housing to pressurize it and another part to the supply line for the actual air nozzle.

After that came a few adapters here and there and then all that was left was assembling it.

Videos:

 
Pictures:

 
Tools:
Metal lathe & accessories
Tap & die set
Table saw
Drill press
Wrenches

Materials:
Engineer's blue
Whole-house filter
Fluid level gauge
1/4" quick connectors
3/4" NPT plugs
4" by 4" by 1" teflon
1/4" vinyl hose
Kool mist type misting system
1" of 1" diameter brass
1" of 1/2" diameter brass
Magnetic base

Cost:
$40.00

Time:
5 hrs

Savings:
$125.00

Conclusion:
It works great.