cutting fluid

Easily! Every know of even a unincorporated wide spot in the road that didn't have a machine shop? Someone has to machine those heads down for the Cannonball Run ;-)

Interesting article, though. My father-in-law (a machinist since his teens) suffered from that chronic cough. He also smoked, but managed to live until age 84. In his last years he couldn't even walk up the fairly gentle slope of our driveway without wheezing :-(

...Jim Thompson

Weird, maybe they need to pasteurize the stuff.

Not cutting hard enough? :-)

Tim

Hmm, Something like 1% of the male working population in the US. I guess I could believe it. (Sorry to any women machinists. I know there must be some, but I've yet to meet one.) Or do they count factory line workers as machinist's?

George Herold

My office opens onto a machine shop. Sometimes, the coolant gets stinky, but I've never seen a machinist get sick from it.

The complainers are probably unionized, and they just want to get paid for catching a damn cold.

Cheers! Rich

It says here that there were about 397,000 in 2006:

Cheers! Rich

Probably many more. We are a very small company and have two machinists, and I know several other companines in our small town with more.

It's emulsified vegetable oil mixed with tap water.

I worked at a place where I helped out by cleaning out the old stuff and mixing and filling machines with fresh stuff.

I ran across one very old machine where some of the stuff had been left in the base/pedestal reservoir of a machine for years and the smell left no doubt that the stuff grew bacteria.

I started the job on that machine by pouring a whole gallon of bleach into the disused reservoir in the pedestal and leaving it for a day.

Since it had no bottom plug, no pump and all access was from the top I believe I used a wet vac to suck it out and dump it.

As usual it was poured down a toilet, minus any shavings.

I flushed and dumped again and left it empty.

I am amazed they seem to think that only ONE bacteria grows in the stuff.

And I feel better about treating the stuff as such a bio hazard.

The more obvious toxics to be avoided there were vaporized nickel, chromium and even radioactive welding rods used for hardness.

It is deliberately designed to have very low toxicity, if any.

The best workers are solitary. Unions became archaic years ago.

The best cooling fluids/cutting fluids are made by Cincinnati Milacron.