Surface Grinder Guide

A surface grinder utilizes an abrasive cutting method to grind, polish, or finish the workpiece with continual flat surfaces rather than round shapes such as cylindrical ID and OD do. In the subsector of the grinding industry, both cylindrical grinding and roll grinding are not like surface grinding. Surface grinding has a head that is lowered to a workpiece, which is moved backward and forth under the grinding wheel on a table that typically has a controllable permanent magnet that works as a magnetic chuck for use with magnetic stock. But it can have a vacuum chuck or other fixture means rather than a magnetic chuck for workpiece clamping.

The most commonly used surface grinders have a grinding wheel rotating on a horizontal axis, which cuts around the circumference of the grinding wheel. Still others such as rotary surface grinders are commonly known as the "Blanchard" grinders, have a grinding head that rotates the grinding wheel on a vertical axis cutting on the end face of the grinding wheel. A table rotates the workpiece in the opposite direction underneath. This type of machine removes large amounts of workpiece materials and grinds flat surfaces with spiral grind marks. It can also be used to make and sharpen metal stamping die sets, flat shear blades such as saws, fixture bases, or any flat and parallel surfaces. Surface grinders can be manually operated, NC controlled, or CNC dominated.


NC Control

NC is more semi-automatic, and the operating system of the NC machine is configured with a humanized operation panel that promises accurate signaling of grinding motions. The friendly human-machine interface not only assures precision operation but also a great convenience for users in the manufacturing sites under different working conditions.

With the modern programming technology, operators of grinders nowadays only need to call the corresponding cutting programs from the machine memory and the machine will process with appropriate grinding motions. In Taiwan, there are many cutting-edge roll grinding machine suppliers that offer comprehensive roll grinding solutions to users all over the world. Many of those Taiwanese grinding machine manufacturers are experienced industry experts who know better than their customers about the application and the technical issues that determine the final precision.


Rotary Parameters

Within the surface grinder inventory, there is a rotary surface grinder. A rotary surface grinding is a highly effective process because of the massive amount of grinding wheels in contact with the surface part of the workpiece objects. Each rotation of the rotary table counts since the entire surface is to be ground that comes in contact with the grinding wheel surface. There are many applications that require custom options or electromagnetic, mechanical, vacuum, pneumatic, or hydraulic workpiece holding. Some grinder providers specialize in collaboration with their manufacturing or engineering team members to produce work-holding devices in order to meet customers’ manufacturing procedures and achieve great repeatable quality, accuracy, and productivity. Aside from the productivity, rotary tables with variable speeds are standard with variable force electro-magnetic chuck as well as electronic sensed. Therefore, through the spindle vacuum, pneumatic or hydraulic are configuration characteristics on most rotary surface grinders in the market now.


Chucks

Chucks are the items that hold the workpieces for the purpose of machining. There are mainly two sources of chuck clamping forces. The first one is magnetic force and the other is mechanical clamping force. Ferro-magnetic pieces are held in place by a magnetic chuck, while non-Ferro-magnetic and non-metallic pieces are held in place by vacuum or mechanical means.

Besides the chucks, a machine vise placed on the magnetic chuck can be used to hold non-ferromagnetic workpieces if only a magnetic chuck is available. Affecting factors to consider in surface grinding are the material of the grinding wheel and the material of the piece being worked on. Compared with some specific grinding cases, traditional workpiece materials include cast iron and mild steel. These two materials don't tend to clog the grinding wheel while they are processed. Other materials that could be ground are aluminum, stainless steel, brass, and some plastics, while the plastics are the least option to be ground since they could be well managed through other measures. The reason why plastics materials are less likely to be ground is that once the grinding process is at a high-temperature level, the material tends to become weakened and is more inclined to corrode. This can also result in a loss of magnetism in the materials. The grinding wheel is not limited to a cylindrical shape and can have a myriad of options that are all useful in delivering different geometries to the object being processed.


Finishing

Surface grinding machines are abrasive cutting machine tools used by manufacturers. In order to provide precise grinding surfaces in the production line, the purpose can be a specific size of scale or for surface finishing. The typical accuracy of a surface grinder depends on the type and application, but on most surface grinders it should be possible to achieve a certain accuracy value so that the ultimate goal is that the mass production model can be achieved.

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