Vacuuming Plastic Machining Chips

Customer has a dual spindle lathe application to machine medical implants. The problem is that the long stringy chips end up clogging up the machining area. The customer has since implemented a vacuum system to move the chips out of the machining area as they are produced, but the vacuum source does not pull hard enough to keep the material moving to a scrap bin. The customer then decided to utilize a push / pull method of blowing the chips into the vacuum hoses and evacuate them using a Model 6085 2-1/2" (64mm) Aluminum Line Vac and Model 2603 3" (76mm) Full Flow Air Knife to proivde a wide air flow to blow across the spindles and into the vacuum tubes. The Full flow Air Knives were chosen for their compact size and ability to stay out of the way of live tooling moving within the machining center. Once implemented, the cusotmer was able to reliably convey the chips away which kept the machining center clean and kept chips from being caught and wrapping around the spindles which affected part quality and time spent cleaning out the machine between cycles.