Cold Air gun... Looks very promising Coolant alternative

Cool stuff. I used to get a similar, though less effective results when using my shop vac at the drill press. In order to reduce on the mess I was getting, I'd use a cutting oil first, and then while drilling, I'd work the feed with one hand while the other hand held a shop vac with a small nozzle next to the piece. This served to decrease the scattering of chips, and the small nozzle resulted in high velocity airflow past the work piece. When I did this, I noticed significantly less heat build-up. It's just hard to handle everything with some pieces.

--nathan
 
I hand mill a lot of custom parts for another hobby of mine and when the chips are flying I use a compressed air gun on the cutter to not only blow the aluminum chips away but to cool the cutter.

It works very well.
 
That looks like the perfect solution for my mill! I have a nice compressor and dotn want fluid all over since the mill is right in the middle of my garage/shop.
 
The cold air gun is different than just compressed air. It uses a special geometry and some weird physics to create two air streams, one hot (which gets exhausted) and one cold (which get sprayed on the cutter). Damn near magic.

These are widely used in industrial machining operations in applications where coolant is not desirable. Coolant is a constant maintenance issue and creates all kinds of expenses from cleaning the parts to its eventual disposal (did you know it costs as much to dispose of coolant and it does to buy it?) and air quality issues, operator dermatitis etc. Cold air is cool. All that said, I still use coolant in my shop... works better...
 
One of the other uses of a tool like Nathan mentioned is in the auto shop. The hot air end is used to heat auto choke assemblies to open the choke, and the cold end is used to close the choke while adjusting. Jess
 
Vortex cooling has been around a while. Unfortunately, the efficiency is very low so it doesn't see many applications. Compressed gas from a cylinder will get a little bit cooler due to expansion and per unit of cooling power will be less expensive.
 
Hankins
I hope you have a big compressor, I have a cold air gun and it takes a god awful amount of air. My 5 horse compressor won't handle it.

Jerry
 
J. Shorter said:
Hankins
I hope you have a big compressor, I have a cold air gun and it takes a god awful amount of air. My 5 horse compressor won't handle it.

Jerry
Click to expand...


That's what I was thinking, the specs say either 15, ot 30 SCFM
that's lots of air.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
The cold air gun is different than just compressed air. It uses a special geometry and some weird physics to create two air streams, one hot (which gets exhausted) and one cold (which get sprayed on the cutter). Damn near magic.
Click to expand...

My old company (pneumatics and hydraulics) picked up the Vortec line in the 90's. We had a lot of fun playing with it but the cost was such that I don't think we ever sold the cold gun to a customer, and we had 5000 of them, almost all manufacturers.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
The cold air gun is different than just compressed air. It uses a special geometry and some weird physics to create two air streams, one hot (which gets exhausted) and one cold (which get sprayed on the cutter). Damn near magic.
Click to expand...

It's a Ranque-Hilsch Vortex tube. They've been around since the 1920's. Google "Maxwell's Demon" :)

The tube creates a vortex that centrifugally spins hot air in one direction of a tee in the compressor outlet, and cool air the other direction.
http://www.rexresearch.com/ranque/ranque.htm

They're very loud, and like Nathan says, they don't cool nearly as well as coolant. They also shoot swarf all over the shop.
 
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