Watched a guy at a trade show in Chicago run a brand new machine with no coolants

Stopped by the big manufacturing expo last Friday and saw this operator running a fresh 5-axis mill, but he had zero coolant in the lines. He was just letting the chips fly dry, which can wreck your cutters real fast. I asked him about it and he said his supervisor told him to skip the coolant until the machine 'loosened up.' Took about 20 minutes before the spindle started sounding like a bag of rocks. Has anyone else seen shops try some wild shortcuts like this to save time or keep the floor clean?

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riveradams20d ago

That supervisor must have been real confident in that machine's warranty. Twenty minutes of dry running before the spindle sounds like gravel is actually a pretty good record, most cutters I've seen would have given up sooner than that. Sounds like they wanted the floor spotless for the show, which is a great way to save a little sweeping time and blow a couple grand on tooling. I bet that machine is still sitting there with a "do not operate" tag on it today. Tell me they at least had extra end mills on hand, because they were definitely gonna need them.