csspecs
Aluminum
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2010
- Location
- Central Florida USA
I found that the following did not work at all:
Cement mixers
Buckets in lathe chucks
natural stone of all kinds
Sand mixed with stone
Shop built rotary tumblers
Solvents (they work but they make a difficult to dispose of waste)
soaps
filters for dust
dry tumbling
mill coolant or soluble oil (rage inducing suggestion, imagine all your parts with the dirt glued to them).
These are just malicious jokes. Roughly like sending the new guy to get some item that does not exist. Except you will spend weeks trying to figure out how to make it work. Suggesting a cement mixer as a tumbler should get you banned for a week.. Honestly you are better off trying to convert a drill press to a CNC mill than a cement mixer into a deburring machine.
What I have found to work well for steel parts.
Larger tumblers starting at about 1.25 cu ft and 150 lbs of media and parts. I like my KVF3 which is a 3.5 cu ft with a 500 lb capacity.
Cycle time for decent smoothing of clean laser cut parts is around 120 minutes on the KVF3, my old shoptuff 1.25 took about 90 minutes but was significantly louder and held less, so slower is faster.. Hairy saw burrs on small parts like little milled 1"x1" parts that are cut on a little bandsaw and have a fairly thick rolled over edge, we found that the edges of the part start getting rounded over too much before the burr was 90% gone, so we do a quick bump on a 120 grit sanding belt and then tumble, since they are getting tumbled there is no concern about being neat with the sander.
Using a tumbler to fix large burrs or big slag drips from a laser or plasma cutter normally is just a frustrating experience since it takes 8+ hours to knock them off. I my shop the goal is to have the parts as smooth and clean as possible before tumbling, the tumbler just smooths the edges, nothing more.
Flow through liquid compound.
Currently using vibrafinish VF-100 with VF-RI-8B rust inhibitor. Also dipping in a heavier mix of RI mix.
Ceramic media. I like the DF type on steel because it is brown and the parts are silver/gray so they are easy to see. Recently I got a batch of UFX and it is sadly a light gray which makes it hard to see parts trying to sneak away.
Zip ties or plastic bolts are another one that can work. I mostly do laser cut parts so I just accept a less than perfectly even finish, my stuff gets nitride finished anyway so most of the time they either acid wash or shot blast, so the finish is normally good anyway.
Cement mixers
Buckets in lathe chucks
natural stone of all kinds
Sand mixed with stone
Shop built rotary tumblers
Solvents (they work but they make a difficult to dispose of waste)
soaps
filters for dust
dry tumbling
mill coolant or soluble oil (rage inducing suggestion, imagine all your parts with the dirt glued to them).
These are just malicious jokes. Roughly like sending the new guy to get some item that does not exist. Except you will spend weeks trying to figure out how to make it work. Suggesting a cement mixer as a tumbler should get you banned for a week.. Honestly you are better off trying to convert a drill press to a CNC mill than a cement mixer into a deburring machine.
What I have found to work well for steel parts.
Larger tumblers starting at about 1.25 cu ft and 150 lbs of media and parts. I like my KVF3 which is a 3.5 cu ft with a 500 lb capacity.
Cycle time for decent smoothing of clean laser cut parts is around 120 minutes on the KVF3, my old shoptuff 1.25 took about 90 minutes but was significantly louder and held less, so slower is faster.. Hairy saw burrs on small parts like little milled 1"x1" parts that are cut on a little bandsaw and have a fairly thick rolled over edge, we found that the edges of the part start getting rounded over too much before the burr was 90% gone, so we do a quick bump on a 120 grit sanding belt and then tumble, since they are getting tumbled there is no concern about being neat with the sander.
Using a tumbler to fix large burrs or big slag drips from a laser or plasma cutter normally is just a frustrating experience since it takes 8+ hours to knock them off. I my shop the goal is to have the parts as smooth and clean as possible before tumbling, the tumbler just smooths the edges, nothing more.
Flow through liquid compound.
Currently using vibrafinish VF-100 with VF-RI-8B rust inhibitor. Also dipping in a heavier mix of RI mix.
Ceramic media. I like the DF type on steel because it is brown and the parts are silver/gray so they are easy to see. Recently I got a batch of UFX and it is sadly a light gray which makes it hard to see parts trying to sneak away.
Zip ties or plastic bolts are another one that can work. I mostly do laser cut parts so I just accept a less than perfectly even finish, my stuff gets nitride finished anyway so most of the time they either acid wash or shot blast, so the finish is normally good anyway.