Coolant
Maintenance Sucks!
Joe
works for a large aviation plant, and had serious problems
removing tramp oil and cutting oil from his large mills. Large
fluctuations in fluid levels and the quantity of tramp oil
in his metalworking fluids (coolant), was making coolant maintenance
difficult. He tried floating skimmers from Keller, Abanaki,
and ITW, but they didn’t work. For his situation a belt
skimmer, disk
skimmer, even a tube
skimmer were not appropriate. For that reason he went
with a Zebra Skimmers Corp. coolant
coalescer, the Zebra Muscle, using
the Hammerhead floating skimmer.
Joe
installed the Zebra Muscle coalescer easily, and the unit
worked perfectly, at first. Then one day Joe called us with
a problem.
“It
stopped sucking” he claimed.
We
didn’t understand why it would fail. Engineering took
over and had Joe go over every element of the oil collection
system in detail. When they got to the Hammerhead, Joe confessed
that, “I suck on the tube to try and prime it but nothing
comes through!”
“You’re
sucking on the tube?” We didn’t believe our ears.
“Yeah.”
“With
all that coolant, metal, and biology in there?”
“Sure!”
What
a guy, we thought. Then we had an inspiration. “Joe,
which way do the Hammerhead floats point?”
“They’re
on the bottom.”
“Joe,”
we said carefully, “turn Hammerhead over, turn the pump
on and tell us how it works. Don’t suck on it, okay?”
Joe
came back to us a few moments later. “Hey, it works great
again! Thanks!”
The
moral:
Don’t EVER suck on coolant!
And give us a call if anything goes wrong - we’ve seen
it all!
Useful Links and Information about Coolant Maintenance
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