Diamond wheels vs SiC

[knave]

Great reminders y’all. Safety is hugely important. Even more so when my precious kids are involved.

[mohs]

need to amend what I foolishly stated above

I do recall some one showing me
an exploded wheel off a grinder collet
It was obviously the talk of the shop for a bit

No one got hurt
And the grind went on


I did manufacturing and re- sharpening
of wood cutting tools for quite sometime

Lots of busy strange machines in tool and cutter grinder shop

Luckily manufacturing and re-sharpening of tools
was not as deathly dangerous
as the end folks who use those tools.

Wood shops
Some dangerous processes

Altho there was a time I almost lost my hand uhhhhhggghhh....

New machine in the shop.
To automatically side grind the carbide teeth
on circular saw blades.
Sweet !

Well I had a 12” circular blade on the spindle.
The blade doesn’t spin.
A feed pawl retracts and advances the next tooth to be ground.
Hydraulic clamps press the blade rim to keep it from moving
The two circular diamond wheels advance at a slow rate and grind.
Fine.

Well I made a tactical error.
The grinding wheels were not in the retracted rest position

Not sure how it happen to this day
Well I do know. Butte It was a long time ago
and there was fail safe feature

That I some how over rode


uuugghhhhhh !

I released the hydraulic clamp,
before the 3250 rpm spinning diamond cup wheels
were in the back rest position.

They caught a tooth.

That blade whirled out at incredible speed out on that spindle.
12” inches of 108 tooth blur
Whooa

I had nasty slice on my left hand. Nasty. Stitches.
Very lucky tho!

The tops of the carbide teeth were not sharpened yet.
Just dull flat tops .
They actually shoved my hand up and out of the way

Otherwise I'd been screwed big time!

[mohs]

amazing & sharp

[mohs]

thanks for the likes on my near disastrous tale
sometime it hard for to realize I did that work

my master machinist pal - all the way back- Nhoj
told me: mohs your no machinist

he was exactly right
didn't have mental acumen -the preciseness-
the vision-
for that most beautiful of crafting
machining whoa

from knapping to CNC machines - Butte!

have all due respect of those craftsmen!


~m

[Starguy]

@edmohs. What a cool precision machine.

[QuailRiver]

I started out on SC wheels 50 years ago this year. Back in those days diamond wheels were very expensive. Especially the coarser grit diamond wheels.

Used SC wheels from 1971 - 1977. Then bought my first diamond wheels from Roy Greene at Gem Crafters. Found diamond wheels to be much faster, cleaner and safer. Also much less chance of contamination. With using SC you really have to make sure to wash the cabochons off well between grits to prevent contaminating the finer grit wheels, belts and pads.

There is nothing wrong with using SC wheels as a less expensive alternative when getting started. And if you like cabbing while using SC wheels then you'll love cabbing when you move on to diamond wheels. And if you find that you don't really enjoy cabbing then you've saved yourself some cash in learning so.

I've bought many lapidary machines (usually faceting machines)over the years from people, or the estates of people, who thought they would enjoy lapidary and went out and bought some of the best and most expensive equipment available at the time only to find that after a few uses for one reason or another they didn't want to do it anymore and let the equipment sit in their basement or garage unused for years - often decades. I loved finding old machines in barely used condition but can't help but feel for the expensive lesson these folks had to live with.

Sorry for the ramble, but anyhow, when using SC it's really important to remember to let the grinding wheels spin dry after each use before turning the machine off. Otherwise they will dry from the top down and if the machine is turned back on while the wheels are wetter at the bottom then the wheel will be out of balance. And using it this way will get it out of round which usually results in them being permanently out of balance.