Waiting for my HDM to arrive and preparing my work place accordingly. Anyone have any thoughts/suggestions/information regarding the cleanup of aluminum shards/pieces? I was planning to purchase a cyclone dust collection system for my wood cleanup, but not sure how this will work when I am working with aluminum. I am not planning anything large scale at the moment with aluminum but want to prepare accordingly.
Anyone with some advice about working with aluminum and its potential cleanup issues, I would greatly appreciate some insights.
Rookie CNC’er
I cut some thin aluminum sheet on my pro xl and get away with just using my shop vac. I dont have a dust collection system but i plan to add one soon. My machine isn’t in a enclosure so the shop vac helps keep the mess down and chips of the rails when cutting.
At least one HDM owner planned for this with a funnel and bucket system with an eye towards recycling.
I have vacuumed up alu. chips with a Sweepy, but the metal chips scratch the plastic and make it cloudy, and of course, since they were mixed in w/ wood chips got pitched (I only put wood chips on my garden (pine, poplar, &c.) or walkways (walnut).
2 Likes
You will find that cutting aluminum at significant MRR will result in large volumes of chips making removal with any sort of dust collection iffy at best.
I cut aluminum, brass, copper occasionally on my HDM and rely upon removable 4” acrylic barriers at the front and back of the machine to contain most of the chips.
2 Likes
I tent to push pretty hard so I make chips fly on my HDM and I’ve fount them 10" away from the machine. I use a mist coolant system, so I can’t really use dust collection on it. Currently I have 24" tall walls on the sides and rear of the machine with a trench in the rear to direct the chips into a box. I put up a piece of plexiglass in the front to keep chips somewhat contained. Unless you go full enclosure chips will get everywhere. Even then, they will get somewhere. 
2 Likes
On the carpet in the house…glitter.
2 Likes
Alum chips are hot. However after they are vacuumed up an sent up the hose they likely cool. You do not want to start a fire in wood chips/dust in the dust collector. So the advise about just containing the chips are a good idea. Alum makes a mess and there is no around it. You have a router bit running at 18K+ throwing chips every where. So if you are going to use a cyclone separator I would put the bucket outside at the end of the day just in case.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.