Grinding Wheel Dressing & Truing

Dressing cleans and restores a glazed and loaded grinding wheel by cutting the surface back to its original sharpness. Diamond dressing a grinding wheel removes dull grains, swarf and excess bonding material, exposing sharp new cutting particles.

Truing, essential for precision grinding, ensures the contact face of the grinding wheel is formed to run absolutely true with the work. An out-of-true wheel will produce chatter marks.

Both dressing and truing are done with the diamond wheel dresser, in a process simply called dressing.

The c-clamp holder of Dumore’s diamond wheel dresser is designed to clamp onto the work in the lathe. To ensure accurate truing of the wheel face, care must be taken to set the diamond at the horizontal centerline of the grinding wheel. The grinding wheel is then passed very slowly across the diamond, taking a very light cut – not more than two or three thousandths at a time. For finer finishes, a cut one thousandth or less should be used with a very slow traverse.

It is important to dress the grinding wheel on the side which will contact the workpiece. A properly dressed wheel will have a wheel face that is absolutely parallel to the work being ground. Unless the wheel is at the point where it contacts the work, the operator cannot be certain that the wheel and work are parallel.

In dressing wheels on a long unsupported extension spindle, there is a tendency for the diamond to dig in. This does not mean the spindle is malfunctioning, but it does prevent the operator from properly dressing the wheel. Overcome this condition by decreasing the wheel speed.