The best tools grind time away

By Staff -- Industrial Distribution, 7/1/2000

Abrasive product development is all about reinventing the wheel. The grinding wheel, that is. A key to the future of abrasives is reducing the time it takes a person to complete a particular application.

Maximizing cost reductions is the goal of any company using an abrasive application process. The less time it takes to complete a project, such as working on an automotive assembly line, the more profit the company earns with less effort. Time also is saved, lending credence to the proverbial time-is-money mantra. For now, in the abrasives industry, that is the focus for the 21st century.

"The trend in precision grinding is to use ceramic grain abrasives," says Wayne Gasper, sales and marketing manager of Indianapolis-based abrasives distributor Haggard & Stocking Associates, Inc.

Superabrasives, such as cubic boron nitride or CBN, continue to be the best choice for automotive applications. The use of diamond wheels will continue to grow.

"The automotive business is still going real well," Gasper says.

Other industries where abrasives play a key role in production are aircraft and agricultural categories. Through experience and expertise, distributors know what type of abrasives work best for particular applications. This in turn leads to stocking the end users' most requested products.

The Waterloo, Ontario, branch of industrial distributor Meyer-Mercer, Inc., is fortunate, says operations manager Steve McGaughey, to have an application specialist on staff. With his in-depth knowledge of abrasive product uses, Shannon Mullin can "spec a special deal for size, specific profile and grade."

In Waterloo, the automotive and aircraft industries give economic sustenance for the community. There are also a lot of tool and die companies in that city.

Meanwhile, abrasive manufacturers continue to refine application processes.

Dr. K Subramanian, of Saint-Gobain Abrasives, is the director of grinding technology at the Higgins Grinding Technology Center in Worcester, Mass. Subramanian describes the abrasives industry as an old one, and about "nothing more than tools to generate surfaces."

The quality, shape, surface and finish of the material being worked on is dependent upon the grinding wheel. Changes in a grinding wheel's composition make all the difference in what applications can result from this change. Work in a shop must be able to be completed as seamlessly as possible, as efficiently as possible. This means having grinding surfaces that require few wheel changes and dressings.

"Manufacturing engineers and production managers must achieve increasingly tight tolerances-geometry, surface finish, surface quality and consistency-and they must do so with harder, difficult-to-grind materials at ever higher productivity rates," Subramanian points out. "This dual requirement for closer control over surface quality, as well as the surface features themselves, will become even more important as demands increase for better component performance."

An increased role in metalworking is where the abrasives industry is headed, Subramanian predicts. Improvements in coated abrasives and superabrasives are underway. Porosity content, he notes, allows greater penetration of coolant into the grinding zone, through the grinding wheel.

The result of a cooler grinding zone is increased cutting efficiency and less metallurgical damage to grinding components.