Shoutout to that coolant manager who saved my Tuesday

Had a job with 316 stainless that kept galling on the thread mill, wasted 4 hours and a $90 insert before I gave up. Our coolant guy from MSC came out, checked the concentration with a refractometer, and it was way weak at like 3% instead of 7. He bumped it up and added some sulfur-based additive, ran the same part perfect on the first pass. Anyone else had a setup guy catch something that dumb simple before you trashed more tooling?

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sage_lewis102mo ago

Galling on 316" sounds about right. I swear that stuff has a personal grudge against thread mills. But yeah, I had a guy catch our coolant at 2% once and the whole shop was acting like it was a mystery why taps kept snapping. One bottle of concentrate later and suddenly everyone's a hero. Glad it wasn't just me burning through $90 inserts for a free lesson in fluid maintenance.

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