Metal Shop Minor Updates

The metal shop has distilled water on hand for use in making lubricoolant for the machines with circulators. Since the Tormach uses this water the fastest, I have bowed to the inevitable and put a shelf underneath the end of the Tormach to store the water there.

Tormach users: please throw out / recycle the empty bottles instead of leaving them lying around. While we do need some empty bottles for waste disposal, we have plenty stored on the machine shop cabinet.


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We have several new trash cans specifically for metal shop use, clearly labeled as such. These cans are smaller, to fit within the more confined space in the metal shop, and to limit their weight, since metal trash tends to be a lot denser than wood trash. Please keep these within the metal shop areas.


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I have co-opted the blue trash can for recycling aluminum chips. This will reside in the auxiliary room and serve as the overflow for the two aluminum-only vacuums and the two aluminum chip buckets kept in the main shop.

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I will try to get a different bin that doesn’t look like a trash can for the steel recycling, but in the meantime please be careful not to throw trash in the metal recycling bins. I very regularly have to fish trash out of the steel recycling bin (understandable) and the aluminum chip buckets (less understandable).
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We have removed the bench grinder from the metal shop. There is essentially no use case for it: the belt sander is clearly superior for all material sanding, and this grinder was not designed for tool sharpening. The grinders near the wood lathes are better suited for this purpose; use them for your tool sharpening needs. (I cleared this with @David; he may want to expand upon the rules for their use.) Plus the bench grinder had been repeatedly misused to grind aluminum. Best just to be rid of it. The stand-alone grinder with the wire brush wheel and deburring wheel remains.

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Thanks for your tireless work to make metalwork a first class part of the shop!

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