What is Surface Grinding

Surface grinding is a process that creates a precise, smooth flat-surface by moving a workpiece back and forth under an abrasive grinding wheel. Surface grinders produce flat parts with high tolerances and low surface roughnesses. They are commonly used when making machine tools, reference surfaces, jig plates, and optical platforms.

Surface Grinder
Surface grinding is an abrasive process. It involves securing the object to a device that will hold it in place (a chuck) before slowly moving the object’s surface across a grinding wheel that’s spinning really fast. This will generate a flat plane wherever the machine comes into contact with the object. It also gives the object an even finish. The longer the wheel spends working on the cutting depth, as well as using a surface grinding wheel with a higher grit count will further improve the surface’s finish. By slowly increasing the depth of the cut the machinist will be able to achieve these things.

Introducing the Surface Grinder
The surface grinding machine is the most common type of grinding machine found in any shop. You can actually compare it to milling cutter that has multiple teeth but the surface grinding machine has a grinding wheel, which makes it an abrasive cutting tool. The wheel is used to remove really small pieces of metal (known as swarf). It works because the wheel is made up of thousands of cutting edges.

These surface grinding tables are used for several different purposes including removing excess material. They work really well on very hard materials (i.e. steel, diamonds) to produce a very high quality finished surface.

How a Surface Grinding Machine Works
The surface grinding machine’s chuck moves back and forth once the table has raised the object so that it’s slightly deeper within the wheel. There are intervals that can be set (i.e. 0.001 inches / 0.0254 mm) with each pass. As the grinding wheel rotates with its abrasive particles small amounts of the object’s material will be removed each time in order to create a flat surface. For this reason, the surface grinding process is usually a finishing step that’s designed to bring an object to a certain tolerance but the procedure is often followed up with a polishing procedure during the grinding-and-lapping process.