Why Precision Tool Grinding Is Important

Precision tool grinding is one of those more or less invisible jobs. After all, how many people do you personally know who make a living grinding steel or carbide industrial tools?
It depends a bit on where you live though. If you live in an industrial center, such as Chicago, you might actually have a relative or neighbor who works as a tool and die maker, injection mold maker, or precision machinist.
These highly skilled tradesmen have spent years mastering the science and art of grinding precision tools, dies, molds and precision machinery. This is not something that can be learned overnight, not by any stretch! It takes a great deal of experience, and a lot of mistakes, before you can become proficient.
For one thing, the dimensional tolerances are exceedingly fine. Just imagine taking a cigarette paper and splitting it in half across the thickness. Then do it again, and you have the kind of tolerance these toolmakers work with every day.
When I was an apprentice, I seemed to operate on the principle of luck. Obviously, this did not serve me well! Grinding is all about making numbers tangible. You have the dimensions on the drawing or CAD screen, and now you must make your workpiece the size called out. It either is to size or it is not to size, there is no subjectivity about it! You cannot BS or bluff your way through, the measurement is the measurement.
Some of the grinders in use are CNC surface grinders, tool and cutter grinders, manual surface grinders, ID/OD grinders, carbide grinders, and creepfeed grinders. All of these are quite capable of holding very close tolerances. They also need to have an industrial dust collector to gather the grinding dust and coolant mist.
These machines all require the use of grinding accessories, such as the granite surface plate, surface gage, dial indicator, magnetic squaring block, sine plate, vee-block, height gage, and squareness checker.
Some of the top grinder manufacturers include: Mitsui, Brown and Sharpe, Reid, Harig, Okamoto and Elb. All of these machines use aluminum oxide, silicon carbide and diamond grinding wheels. Depending on the application, there is always a grinding wheel made for the job, you just need to seek it out sometimes.
Randy Hough has a website: http://PrecisionToolGrinding.com that talks about the various types of precision grinders, grinding accessories and their application.