Roll Grinder Guide

In the metal working industry, there are a wide variety of grinding machines, and roll grinders are very efficient for many kinds of grinding processes. A roll grinder belongs to power grinding machines category that used for grinding process, which is a common type of machining that utilizes abrasive wheel or wheels as the cutting means for processing. Each grain of abrasive on the wheel's surface cuts a small chip from the work pieces through shear deformation method. There is a huge number of grinding machine classifications due to the complicated grinding mechanisms that are all different from one another.

Inventory and classifications

Furthermore, regarding the grinder inventory, there are belt grinder, bench grinder, cylindrical grinder, surface grinder, tool & cutter grinder, jig grinder, gear grinder, die grinder, angle grinder, and roll grinder, just to name a few. Cylindrical grinder includes both the types that use centers and the center-less types. A cylindrical grinder may have multiple grinding wheels for different purposes. The work piece is rotated and fed past the wheel(s) in order to form a cylinder. It is utilized to make precision rods, tubes, bearing races, bushings, and many other parts. On the other hand, centre grinding, or center, is usually employed as a machining process when manufacturing all kinds of high-precision shafts. The primary function of this kind of machines is to grind the centers of a shaft very precisely. An accurate round center hole on both sides ensures a position with high repeat accuracy on the live centers, rendering active productivity as well as quality.

Feature differences

As a result, though roll grinding is nearly the same as cylindrical grinding in most of the processing details, there are some critical differences between roll grinders and cylindrical grinders. First of all, method of roll grinders developed specifically for certain tasks such as heavy works. Therefore, these machines are larger in size, heavier in weight, and are more rigid if compared with plain cylindrical grinders. As a result, normally these machines have no provision for doing tapered works and tasks. Usually, rolls are commonly used in many industrial sectors for processing products, for paper, paint, steel, textiles, and rubber material processing tasks and demanded goals.

However, the length of the rolls varies from a few centimeters up to six meters or more, and throughout the length, a highly finished surface is required. In practical usages, these rolls give sheet metal work pieces the high finish, which is required without polishing or further buffing. In addition, if the rolls are designed to be used for cold-forming metal, then the great pressure between the work and the rolls would cause the rolls to spring apart at the center. Also, once if such situation occurred, the rolled metal would be thicker at the center while thinner at the edges if the perfectly uniform diameter rolls were used for this purpose. Therefore, the desirable correct curve of the face of the roll needs to be carefully calculated. In addition, when it comes to roll grinding, machines should occur with a crown or convex surface for precision. Usually roll grinders would have provisions for rotating the rolls on their own bearings. And, they may also rotate on the tailstock and headstock centers. These are all phenomenon description.

Surface grinding and the corresponding mechanism

Up to now, the ones we have talked and discussed are roll grinding, cylindrical grinding, internal grinding, are in a certain kind of view point belong to a group of grinding duties.

However, unlike cylindrical grinders and roll grinders, surface grinder has a head that is lowered to a work piece, which is moved backwards and forth under the grinding wheel on a table that typically has a controllable permanent magnet (which work as a magnetic chuck) for use with magnetic stock, but can have a vacuum chuck or other fixture means. The most common surface grinders have a grinding wheel rotating on a horizontal axis cutting around the circumference of the grinding wheel. Rotary surface grinders, commonly known as "Blanchard" style grinders, have a grinding head which rotates the grinding wheel on a vertical axis cutting on the end face of the grinding wheel, while a table rotates the work piece in the opposite direction underneath. This is the structural design of the machine.

Accordingly, this type of machine removes large amounts of material and grinds flat surfaces with noted spiral grind marks. It can also be used to make and sharpen metal stamping die sets, flat shear blades, fixture bases or any flat and parallel surfaces. Surface grinders can be manually operated or have CNC controls. With CNC control system, the programmed grinding would be steady and smooth, but the systems are subject to users’ working habits and there are now many self-developed grinding machine controllers all over the world. Users of roll grinders or any other grinding machines need to study and learn how to manage the systems first in order to carry on their processing; otherwise the operation will not be easy. Manufacturers and customers are working together to make the process more humane to everyone involved in the manufacturing procedure.

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