the rubber matting sold for workshops (the one with many holes) will trap quite a bit of flying swarf – I made a simple clip on transparent guard to the table of my small X1 but this restricts placement of vice etc but ok for many jobs – a special pair of shoes/slipons/safety shoes depending on type of work worn only in workshop + exchanged at boundary will help as will spare carpet laid near door

Unfortunately most plastic type guards just seem to get in the way no matter how cleverly desgigned or positioned. A magnetic swarf picker-upper tool is great for around the machine and on the floor. I made my own out of copper tubing in an hour or so, but you can buy them.

Obviously of little use for non-ferrous stuff though! That's a vacuum / brush job.

regards. Mike

You can get small magnets from Ali Express already drilled, which will almost pick up the vise, never mind the chips !

I have one of them screwed to a piece of dowel rod and it has no bother picking up my visegrip from the floor every time I drop it [dont ask how often that is ]

I find that it is ideal for cleaning up the mill table and the lathe, cheap and effective.

One of my problems with swarth I do a great deal of aluminium milling and turning more on a large scale size.

Small chips my vacuum can pick up but bigger bits clog the hose.

Is there an ally magnet? I applied for a job years ago at a refuse recycling place and they had something that automatically removed the different assorted metals on a conveyor this was on a small scale.

“Small chips my vacuum can pick up but bigger bits clog the hose.”
try to find a smooth wall tube and connect this to a old cyclone rescued from a defunct upright vacuum cleaner (tho I suspect any air tight rigid box would do) and connect this to your vacuum system

Is there an ally magnet? ” NO – the metal sorter might well have worked on similar principles to metal detectors in detecting the changes to a tuned RF coil.

Now I know how its sorted

Non-magnetic from magnetic is easy – just a magnetic head drum on a conveyor belt. The non magnetic falls away before the magnetic by half the drum width separation.

When my "chariot a vis" (ref albums) was underway, there was a huge amount of mess very quickly as all the big parts were cast iron. A sheet of thin polycarbonate from the local friendly hardware shop was cut up as required and clipped to anything close using bulldog clips. It contained most of the mess, was very cheap, fairly effective. Don't over think it!!

cheers

Bill

The shoe problem is easy to overcome – change footwear at the workshop door.

I can't help with chips flying away from the machine other than to suggest the screen sold by Arc, I think, which has a magnetic base and thus can be positioned wherever it is needed.

In respect of the dovetails, I have used that damp proof course plastic on the lathe as an extension to the cross-slide and it does seem to work ok.

Otherwise, for the milling machine, mine, a Warco MiniMill, came with corrugated bellows which I found soon split along an interior bend. I have used some bellows supplied by Arc with the same result, and now I'm using an idea I picked up somewhere, by Harold Hall I think, of using cereal package cardboard, lightly scored where it has to bend, and then given a good coating or two of any old polyurethane varnish. This does seem to be lasting rather better than the rubber items, but unfortunately is rather stiff. Perhaps I didn't make the scoring deep enough.

Regards,

Peter G. Shaw