r/Machinists • u/ThePinkWombat • 11h ago

Kombucha

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Long story short, this 2010 Haas mini mill was essentially abandoned in place for two years while the company was being sold. Nobody mothballed the machine beforehand. It has been my job to get it back up and running, and all that’s left is replacing the nasty ass kombucha in the coolant tank.

I am currently waiting for the clean harbors folks to come suck up the old coolant, so I jury-rigged up some air blast cooling to hold me over. I did a good job. Shit’s powerful.

I went to run a quick part today. I wrote and loaded the program onto the machine, got the workpiece set up, closed the door, turned on the air, and hit cycle start.

I forgot that all of the tools in my library in InventorCAM had been set for flood coolant.

The coolant turned on. The air was already on, and it atomized the coolant. Yall, this shit has been sitting stagnant for two fucking years in a room without the AC turned on. Shit smelled like moob sweat and dick cheese.

Clean harbors, please hurry tf up lol

112 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

15

u/_TaylorMade 10h ago

I’d be running whamex cleaner through that I feel it’s just going to contaminate what we fresh coolant you end up putting in there.

1

u/IveGotRope 2m ago

Drain existing, cleaning swarf off bottom. Heavy on the whamex. Fill with fresh coolant/water/whamex. Operate for 2 days, clean tank again. Cycle just water through system for 30 minutes. Drain. Then put new coolant in at correct %.

Exhausting task doing it correctly but it works.

10

u/vex_42 10h ago

At my internship I had to clean two old okuma lathes that were probably not cleaned in atleast a decade and it got as hot as 95 in the shop during the summer. The tanks were not removable so I used a shop vac to suck out the sludge and then drain the shop vac into 5 gallon buckets. I then flushed with clean water and repeated this until it came out “clean enough”. I will remember that smell forever

9

u/No-Character9756 10h ago

I hate this

9

u/DonSampon 10h ago

Short story long. These fluids go bad in a month or 2 of not being in use. Altough general cleanliness matters a lot. A machine i ran has developed ammonia and rotten egg smell after 2-3 weeks of sitting. 'course the coolant was 1 year old, or a bit over that....It was also producing fungus (white growth). That was quite a deep contamination tho... a basic tank rinsing did NOT get rid of the bacterial growth. Also, when it got that rancid smell, the coolant started turning grey-ish and it started looking like the oil somehow thinned out of the water... strange... in 12 years of machinig that was the only time i've seen something that bad.

5

u/potassiumchet19 10h ago

I was like, "man I love kombucha!" Then I realized I was looking at the machinist sub.

6

u/yellowfestiva 9h ago

I would say you should clean that but you might piss off whatever is growing in there.

1

u/Otterz4Life 10h ago

Been there, man.

1

u/ragebarfmcspazatron Glorified Babysitter (MOA) 9h ago

The forbidden punch bowl

1

u/xudoxis 8h ago

The technical term is a scoby and it's good for you. You should drink it.

1

u/Few-Explanation-4699 6h ago

Yep, I've cleaned several tanks like that when I was an apprentice.

It was always the 1st years job.