Diamond dressing
The operation of diamond dressing can be applied to recondition the grinding wheel in order to restore its original profile or to dress it in order to restore it to its original grinding capacity. Profiling in the strict sense is always executed with the diamond tools available, but is rather time-consuming and causes significant wear to the diamond. This is why we provide a pre-profiling service, roughly finishing the desired profile at a very low cost.
There are no set dressing parameters, as these depend on various factors, such as grade of finish desired, type of diamond, grinding operation to be performed, and so on. The following table gives rough guidelines for the main parameters.
| ROUGH FINISHING | FINAL FINISHING | |
| DIAMOND SPEED | 500 ÷ 800 mm/min | 200 ÷ 400 mm/min |
| DEPTH OF CUT PER PASS | 0,02 ÷ 0,04 mm | 0,005 ÷ 0,015 mm |
By varying the diamond dressing parameters the behaviour of the grinding wheel can be changed.
The easiest way to give the wheel greater grinding capacity is to increase the speed of the diamond and the depth of cut per pass during dressing.
In this way a sort of threaded surface is created, spacing out the grains in contact with the piece and aiding the cutting action.
However, the surface finish will deteriorate as a result.
We therefore perform rough finishing using this expedient, leaving a small amount of excess metal for finishing.
This expedient should be used for all operations, even those which are not critical for the grinding wheel: in this
way we will be able to save a great deal of time in rough finishing and achieve the desired finish in any case.
Naturally if a better finish is desired it is sufficient to perform the opposite action, taking care not to run into problems of grinding burn or poor grinding on the workpiece. It should be borne in mind however that to obtain these variations single-point or chisel-type diamond dressers should preferably be used: multi-diamond tools
in fact are not always able to produce the desired changes on the surface of the grinding wheel.
The following table summarises the effect of varying the diamond dressing parameters on the behaviour of the grinding wheel.
| DIAMOND DRESSING PARAMETERS | CUTTING CAPACITY | FINISH | GRINDING WHEEL WEAR | |
| DIAMOND SPEED | > < |
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| DEPTH OF CUT PER PASS | > < |
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