How to dress a grinding wheel

Regardless of whether you are using aluminium oxide, CBN (borazon) or diamond, grinding wheels need to be dressed to perform successfully.

Aluminium oxide wheels need to be first dressed to thickness to perfectly match your tracing pin/stylus. Dressing to thickness provides a “true running” wheel, which following this, requires you to dress the wheel radially. This can also be to shape the wheel to match the pin and again “true” the wheel. Although this may seem like fundamental advice, what is less known is how to dress (clean) CBN  and diamond wheels

Most people use the same principles as mentioned above from our aluminium oxide experience, however with these newer technology wheels, we are only “cleaning” the wheel and to do this effectively you must adhere to two very important tips;

• Leave the dressing sticks in a container of grinder coolant (half a drink bottle etc) so they are wet and soft.
• Turn the machine off and dress the “slowing” wheel, even stopping the wheel with the stick.

The softer stick operating on a slowing wheel now has a chance to do its job, to remove the build up between the very fine grit. And your dressing sticks will actually last longer, as a dry stick on a fast wheel is like using chalk on the grinding wheel.

To see how to clean a grinding wheel in action, view the video below.