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Types of Grinding Machines – LearnMech

Grinding Machines

Grinding Machines are also regarded as machine tools. A distinguishing feature of grinding machines is the rotating abrasive tool. Grinding machine is employed to obtain high accuracy along with very high class of surface finish on the workpiece.

However, advent of new generation of grinding wheels and grinding machines, characterised by their rigidity, power and speed enables one to go for high efficiency deep grinding (often called as abrasive milling) of not only hardened material but also ductile materials.

Conventional grinding machines can be broadly classified as:

(a) Surface grinding machine
(b) Cylindrical grinding machine
(c) Internal grinding machine
(d) Tool and cutter grinding machine

Surface grinding machine:

This machine may be similar to a milling machine used mainly to grind flat surface. However, some types of surface grinders are also capable of producing contour surface with formed grinding wheel.

Basically there are four different types of surface grinding machines characterised by the movement of their tables and the orientation of grinding wheel spindles as follows:

• Horizontal spindle and reciprocating table
• Vertical spindle and reciprocating table
• Horizontal spindle and rotary table
• Vertical spindle and rotary table

Cylindrical grinding machine

This machine is used to produce external cylindrical surface. The surfaces may be straight, tapered, steps or profiled.

Broadly there are three different types of cylindrical grinding machine as follows:

1. Plain centre type cylindrical grinder
2. Universal cylindrical surface grinder
3. Centreless cylindrical surface grinder

Internal grinding machine

This machine is used to produce internal cylindrical surface. The surface may be straight, tapered, grooved or profiled.

Broadly there are three different types of internal grinding machine as follows:
1. Chucking type internal grinder
2. Planetary internal grinder
3. Centreless internal grinder

Setup-of-internal-centerless-grinding-machine

Tool and cutter grinder machine

Tool grinding may be divided into two subgroups: tool manufacturing and tool resharpening. There are many types of tool and cutter grinding machine to meet these requirements. Simple single point tools are occasionally sharpened by hand on bench or pedestal grinder. However, tools and cutters with complex geometry like milling cutter, drills, reamers and hobs require sophisticated grinding machine commonly known as universal tool and cutter grinder. Present trend is to use tool and cutter grinder equipped with CNC to grind tool angles, concentricity, cutting edges and dimensional size with high precision.