The NASTIEST Thing I’ve Seen in a Machine Shop

this is everything in heizer aerospace facility in pevely mo

I thought I found a tennis ball in a oil container under a hone machine it was a rat

This is what you have a maintenance department for. They PM the machines on a scheduled basis. Clean out the chips from the coolant tanks,clean the chip conveyor and change the filters on machine and mist collector.

those tanks have been bad since the start. Some of the guys put nasty stuff in it for sure. ROOKIE! have I got a job for you.

Back when i was making prototypes and actual products for medical use ( eye operation tools, cancertreatment tools this size of a matchhead ) we had to use pure cutting oil, no waterbased mixture.. All our machines were equipped with some serious extinquishing equipment.. Then one day, i look over towards my colleagues machine ( he wasn't in for the day... ) But! a trainee was, and well.. The boss himself who was a big ass "know it all" put the trainee on that machine to machine a titanium part.. WITHOUT telling the poor guy how to do things.
The guy goes to work, and it all seemed to go fine until he hit start on the program and sparks went flying.. I heard a big ass BOOM... i thought the machine had crashed, it kind of did cos he forgot to check -Z on a tool and it went abit deep, but nothing too serious.. Unfortunately deep enough to get super hot and throw sparks..
The door on that Lathe literally missed the guy by a few centimeters... Luckily he didnt get hit nor burned, but that stuff looked well scary.. Good thing is, the fire was immediately stopped by the system.. So no big ass ball of flames got out of there..

ill get back there and clean it

Had a job a few years back, I started getting a horrible rash after running one machine, none of the other 4 I ran caused issues. I asked my supervisor and got nothing, asked the shop director and still got nothing. They all told me (including HR!) that I "wasn't washing my hands enough". I quit a week later and a month after that they finally tested the coolant. It had a flesh eating bacteria in it and they sent me a half-assed apology letter. I sent them a lawsuit.

maybe you can try a source of carbon no3 put some (wortka) in it it Wil take a lot of the nasty chitt oud of it En the bad bectira wil disappear end of you aerate your tank then it will work even better if you get a 200 L thank you can add 5 ml every day you whil be amazed

I have seen this before when I was a young fella I started my time in Engine reconditioning I did two years before I found out a lot of people were just cheap workers I was grinding crankshafts and now I am a qualified Boilermaker welder Rigger. 🇦🇺👨‍🏭

Coolant is extremely hard on your respiratorial system as well

Years back when I worked in a machine shop we had a major coolant issue and they ended up having to dump all this old coolant into the system that smelled exactly like pig manure! It was bad, I almost threw up when they dumped it in.

first clean second operate the machine

Its baffling how many shops simply don't care about their equipment.

I used to work at a shop that had some wrank smelling coolant and I used to get staph infections. I left there and I have never had another staph infection since!!!

I’ve worked with lazy team leads and supervisors and it sucks. An what sucks more is seeing them being best friends with the lazy workers

Cleaning most of the time is not the operator yet the boss who will not allow the time to do the job

Yeah, if you have to use water based coolant pay the extra money for the Swiss lube.
I use to do a lot of milling with just high pressure air. Making blue chips and hogging material. Touch the part after a cut and it's cold, but the chips are hot asf.
I actually like cutting oil too. Not water soluble. But not good for jobbing shops, because oil isn't the best all-round.
I've used kerosene too on brass and tapping cast iron. And for EDM kerosene is the best in my opinion, maybe now they have something better?

And that sludge at the bottom….🤮

Dip spit in the machines… 😡

My last manufacturing job tried making me deal with some HAAS machines they didn't clean for easily 2 years(!) my first month in and I asked if this is normal. When they said yes I said I don't work in poorly managed shit-holes and just walked lol. Fuck those people. I'd rather scrub Gilroy's toilet then die from Staph or MRSA or some other BS to save some boomer dickhead a nickel lol. I've had enough shit employers to know there's way bigger burdens to working in places like that once they have you trapped.

This urinating in the machines thing was way more common than a lot of owners know lol. My dad was in the biz 50 years and said it used to SOP and an unspoken expectation. Super messed up stuff those old timers used to do or tolerate.

I work in the rail industry in uk and most the machines in our shops are like that the lads complain and try to sort it but management won't sort it properly the old manager drilled a hole in the side of building and pumped it outside a couple of times was reported but nothing happed he's finished now due to a few dodgy things. And yes iv seen a lad piss in the white water (coolant) tank on a band saw dirty bastard

Work for Metal Technologies Inc. and the whole building smells like that. Over probably 40+ machines. Place is pitiful

We had a similar incident years ago at smith int’l. Several guys that came in contact with the same set of machines started getting soars all over their arms. We to changed our coolant. We never found out what caused it, but the issue was resolved with a great coolant.

Saw a guy take a piss in a giant Haas with organic coolant

Just left my job because the coolant made the air quality so fucking bad. I could feel my lungs filling with whatever was in the air.

Almost 75% of the acme operators i have seen chew and spit their dip right in the machine while they run it. Chucker guys do it more than the bar machine guys

Hydrogen sulfide fun fact. If you can smell it, it won't kill you. If you cant smell it, you're in trouble.
Be careful when sniffing around for the source.

Machines like that are really common in machine shops because management doesn't want to stop the machines to clean them out properly

At the shop I worked at absolutely refused to believe me that it was fungus growing in the violent tanks. He would just tell me to empty too coolant, and refill it, and to not waste my time cleaning it. This was a daily occurrence, I don't know why he thought that nobody else could be right. One day I "wasted" my time cleaning the damn thing. He got incredibly pissed off, and said that if I do it again then I'm going to be fired. The coolant was perfectly fine after that though, it was the same coolant in the machine from the day I did it, to the day I unlimited quit.

Wow i am now realizing how gross the shop i work at is

One thing that can be done easily, is testing the PH of the coolant everyday. The test strips are really cheap, and some coolant can become acidic, or even highly basic. This can cause corrosion on the machine, and the parts. When we would see a coolant tank start to go acidic, we would flush the tanks, and refill the whole system with fresh coolant. Preventative maintenance schedules should always involve coolant monitering.

How ANYONE could ever spit, urinate, or put anything else in or even remotely near these beautiful machines is absolutely beyond me... Absolute GRIMEY lesser than animals these people are... Even an animal doesn't go where they work, sleep, eat, etc... let alone do this to highly expensive, dangerous, and sophisticated equipment that they themselves use to machine parts... Come on... wow. I think anyone who does something so vile to a machine should be not only immediately fired for it but also put on a world-wide machine offenders list so they don't get hired anywhere else because those people are not even remotely of the correct mindset to be working around equipment... Absolutely disgusting and blows my mind. If you reading this are one of these disgusting idiots please excuse yourself immediately from the industry because you are not worth the paycheck you receive, go twiddle your thumbs elsewhere or work in the sewers where you'd find a more comfortable and natural environment for yourself.

A pond filter costs like $90 and will keep coolant clean for years if you maintain them. I don't get it

No matter the job or environment, cleanliness is next to Godliness.
Even in an accounting dept. cleanliness matters and improves operations.

Dirty employees are bad employees.

Shop foreman coming out of the toilet at 10am every morning was the nastiest thing experienced. Normal people make potty before coming to work.

BOOM

as long as the coolant does not fight back it does not need to be changed

Had a coolant pit at a multibillion dollar company smell so bad I was at the stage of vomiting.

cigarette butts will make the coolant smell awful

People don't want to clean em. I know cause I've cleaned machines before and I'm not even a machinist. I'm a shipper at a shop.

INVEST IN AN OZONE GENERATOR!!!!!!!!!
Reduces coolant maintenance costs and safer environment for operators!

Dang, glad to know this.

I recently left a shop because I was having health issues ever since I started working there. Guys never cleaned the machines, and on top of that they had were old and didn't have air filters on them. I knew it smelled bad, but I didn't know it was dangerous.

Used to get fungal ear infections constantly just from the coolant in the air. Left the shop, immediately stopped. I'v heard of people 💩 in the tank, because their managers wouldn't let them go to the restroom. There really needs to be a food safe coolant that doesn't have the side effect standard coolants do. Great stuff! Keep it up! 🔥💯

Dead mice.
In the sump of a machine I bought.
As for coolant types.. we can talk for days..

Does anybody know how to get an employer to take these situations seriously? I work st a shop that has disgusting coolant smell that burns my nostrils and down my esophagus and the smell is spreading to other machines. I have reported the issue but nobody seems to care. I'm stuck here for the next few months for healthcare reasons so i can't just quit.

B&B diversified will let there machines be rancid and have bacterial build up like this for a year or years at a time. So disgusting. Health hazard. They don't care. Pretty sure the dump i work for uses blaser

The job I started at, 19years old... man, the lathe did not have its coolan´t changed like... ever I guess....and the boss would get angry if I implyed it should mby be cleaned atleast that year before christmas. We were had machines that couldn´t use their whole Z axis because the chips were piled up so high, like 60cm of chips just piled up under the machines. Needless to say I quit that job but it´s still sad that there are still people working in places like this, the time stopped 30 years ago there (and mby they got a 5th hand CNC 15 years ago), no matter how hard you work at a place like this, it would be an extreme suffering to ever keep up with the competition and make any sort of liveable money.

The job shops here in the post communist countries, you wouldn´t belive. People bought the factories with the old machines for basically nothing right after the fall of the regime and have been treating their newly accuired factories as such, only focusing on getting work done with zero investment in maintenance whatsoever.

I'd about kill a mother fucker if I found out that the coolant that was getting on my hands, face, clothes, eyes and lungs for days, werks and months on end was the dude working next to me's piss. I would lose it and probably wind up in a cell.

Hey just to be clear about something at my shop we have many nexjen skimmers, and they have a big filter to catch everything that's bright white pretty much if maintained can get up to 90% of oil an metal. Would everyone agree that if the filter turned sludgy brown/black/green it needs to be cleaned in order to keep the tank in a certain status

I'm reviving an old mitsubishi cnc (and possibly upgrade the CNC controller), it has been idle for years (the owner cannot afford an operator), first thing to do ... CLEAN ... CLEAN .. CLEAN... clean the endstops, clean the encoders voila the machine starts moving again (no jumps during the moves anymore due to gunk on the encoder discs. It's interesting to see how the heck can a foggy layer happen on an encoder disc, this whole thing is sealed.
The owner just said but all other shops also treat those machines like that, no clean, just run it smoke cigarettes infront of it and throw the left over into it. Let it corrode but at least you can still say - hey the machine is workable!
I am not interested in machining itself, I just want to make my own parts for my products (which consist of software, electronics and some mechanical parts) - but since I got full access to that machine I still clean it for my own advantage.