Here’s Three Ways Of Centerless Grinding
If you have grinding jobs, you would be smart to consider giving centerless grinding an oppourtunity. Unlike the more familiar and traditional grinding, centerless grinding isn’t restricted by having to use spindles. Centerless grinding is always a very efficient way to grind your parts. When a centerless grinder is used, the material being worked on that you set into the grinder doesn’t have to be handled nearly as many times, as it would with a traditional grinder. Because the work piece doesn’t need to be moved as much, you will be able to have more pieces ready in a smaller amount of time. This of course, saves you money and time. Did you know there are actually three methods of centerless grinding? Move on to see what they are.
The three ways to do centerless grinding are: Infeed, through feed, and end feed.
Infeed Grinding
One of the more important attributes of doing infeed grinding is the centerline height of the material as it sits on the centerless work rest blade. However, probably most crucial to implementing infeed grinding is that the workblades and wheel settings are properly aligned on the grinding machines so that your workpieces are ground round instead of oblong. Otherwise, the grinder won’t be able to do a nice grinding job on the parts. Proper assembly of the workblades is absolutely critical. During infeed grinding, the parts are placed into the working area and are slid across the workblades to a pre-determined depth. Infeed grinding is more closely related to plunge grinding on OD grinders. What they share in common is that the part being worked on is held still in the axial direction while the machine works the pieces.
Through Feed Grinding
Through feed grinding is especially handy when you have a large quantity of pieces needing to be ground in a short amount of time. You can just load the material into the centerless grinders and allow the cant of the regulating wheel pull the material cross the workblade as the grinding wheel does its job and put the next piece in. These feed wheels used in through feed grinding are placed on an inclined plane. The regulating wheel is adjusted on an incline so the part being worked on will properly pass across the workblade. In this process, the feed wheel does two important jobs. The feedregulating feed wheel spins the work piece on top of the centerless blade and pushes it against the grinding. This type of thru-feed grinding lets the centerless grinding machine to more easily and quickly grind the material being fed into it.
End Feed Grinding
The last method of centerless grinding, and less commonly used compared to the above two, is end feed grinding. End feed grinding involves having a workpiece and moving it across the workblade axially; then the material pauses while the material is being ground. The material is then pushed out of the workblade area. This application of centerless grinding permits you to have a wider range of shapes. However, the workblade on the end-feed grinding setup will only permit the material being ground to get smaller in diameter.
No matter what kind of centerless grinding you do, it’s important that you check that your regulating wheels are set up correctly in relation to the workblades on your centerless grinders. If the work pieces are not coming out in round, then it’s likely the regulating wheels on your centerless grinder aren’t properly set up to match the workblade height. Centerless grinding is a fabulous method to complete out a lot of production with very little set up and parts handling.