Grinding wheels for bench grinder?

How much money do you want to spend?

Woodturners Wonder has CBN wheels that don’t break the bank. ~$150 and you can side wheel with em. Plus no AO grit flying around the shop.

A 2x72 belt grinder with a 36g ceramic belt will shape a chunk of HSS in minutes. I had zero experience grinding HSS and with Mikey’s tutorial and a belt grinder I produced great bits very easily.
 
Found a 6" CBN wheel from Shars that was marked down to $75 to fit my carbide grinder. The AO wheels do throw grit around, but any grinding is a messy process. Keep your grinding out of the same room as your good machinery.
 
Woodturners Wonder has balancing washers to true up the wheels to your grinder too.
 
woodchucker said:
so these days, most wheels wobble. I don't know why. I use shims on the sides of the wheels to help with that. I cut moons out of index cards or paper. it balances the wobble out quite a bit. if you get it close it won't matter.

I would say forget the coarse and fine.
just go for coarse. The question is what are you grinding. if HSS get a white wheel, if mild steel get a gray wheel.
if only HSS get a white wheel, and a scotchbrite deburring wheel.
I'll have to look at my white wheel, I have both coarse and fine, but don't use the fine. I don't know what grit the coarse is, so I'll look in a while.
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If you're using the wheels to create and sharpen HSS lathe tooling I would definitely get both course (60) and fine (100) wheel. The 60 works best for initially creating the tool from a blank, but once you have the basic tool the fine wheel can be used to both finish and resharpen the tool.

I have several grinders in the shop. One has AO wheels for HSS tooling, a second has SO wheels for touching up carbide tools, and I'm in the process of building a version of a long arm buffer with scotchbrite wheels for deburring. In most case I find it's much faster and easier to use a belt grinder than a bench grinder to create and sharpen HSS. In the scheme of things, the 2 bench grinders are some of the least used tools in the shop

The grinder with SO wheels is rarely used. If I'm in a hurry I occasionally use it to touch up a brazed carbide tool. It's messy and doesn't do nearly as good a job as the diamond wheel on the surface grinder.

I haven't looked for diamond or CBN wheels for my surface grinder in quite some time. However, they do occasionally appear on eBay for reasonable prices. I was able to find 2 new 7"diamond wheels and a new 7" CBN wheel for less than $70.00 each.
 
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