Turning on the coolant pump on the lathe yesterday evening for my inaugural lathe session, the flow sputtered then ran dry. I assumed it was a little low and poured in a gallon from the bottom shelf behind the cold saw, but that had no effect. The coolant sump under the tailstock (behind the panel) looked completely empty even after the gallon but I’m not sure what it should look like.
How long has it been since you took the lathe class? @mgmoore will probably be able to tell when it was changed, but what he said when I took the classes (mill and lathe) is that we haven’t had people doing cuts that need coolant often enough to keep the lathe, or either manual mill filled with coolant all the time.
IIRC the process if you need coolant is to add coolant until its full (you can see it through the grate where it drains back into the reservoir). But I haven’t been doing anything with tight (any) tolerance or cutting steel.
Actually, it is the mill coolant circulator that we no longer keep filled by default; the lathe should generally still have coolant. The reservoir needs to have a couple of gallons of fluid in it before the pump will get it flowing, so a single gallon might not be enough. (I assume you turned the valve on the spigot all the way open.)
Yup I had the valve on the gooseneck open. I saw in the manual on the wiki that the capacity is ~16qt and would take more to fill from empty, but is it normal to lose that much from when we saw it working on Tuesday?
I added a gallon on Thursday with the same result. I’ve generally given up on the coolant pump do to its erratic flow and just use the squeeze bottle instead.
It’s never been great, but it sounds like something has gone awry. Unfortunately I can’t get up there to look at it anytime soon.