Surface Grinder Initial Tooling

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benster

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I recently purchased a Grizzly G3155 surface grinder that did not come "ready to use". I need a hub for the grinding wheels, a wheel dresser, and some wheels. I may also need a wheel balancer.

I do not know a lot about grinding. Starting off, do I want one rough wheel and one finishing wheel? What grits should I go with? I know a diamond dresser is necessary. Do I need a wheel balancer or should I be OK with a good quality Norton wheel or similar?

Thanks in advance!
 
My go to wheels are a 46H and a 60i. I haven't needed a wheel balancer ever. Dressing diamond is a must, most make their own holder. Make sure you have the proper dust collection in place before you ever dress a wheel. Always use the cardboard blotters, one on each side of the wheel. Buy lots of hubs, but make sure you purchase the proper "hand" for your grinder. Most grinders use LH threaded hubs but there are some that use RH.
 
Pretty easy to build a wheel balancer, just look at some photos of them or visit you tube. If your dust collection is not top notch wear a respirator. For wheels I like porous wheels, they don't load up like tight grain wheels. I also like soft wheels, going against conventional wisdom of soft for hard metal and and hard for soft metal. If you want to do form work you might want some high grit wheels. I can not speak for others but when I started out grinding my skill set improved dramatically when I quit grinding dry and started using flood coolant. I much prefer flood coolant to mist for grinding, cuts down on dust, keeps part temperature stable and has cut down the tendency to burn the part by about 90+ % in my case.

You can watch you tube videos and get a decent education on grinding especially the ones from Suburban tool. You will find that with practice you can open up the wheel with a roughing dress, then redress with lighter dress and close the wheel down a bit for a smoother finish. Switching wheels is time consuming IMO, if you can figure out how to rough and finish with one wheel you are miles ahead.

I have gotten some pretty nice no name USA made wheels that after dressing serve me just as well as name brand wheels. Also a lot of name brand wheels on ebay at decent prices.
 
Thanks for the advice ya'll. The grinder originally came with a flood coolant pump and tank, so it has the plumbing and connection for a flood coolant motor. The coolant tank/pump were not included with this, but I can easily add one. I'll have to look into it. What hubs do ya'll use? Are they unique to each grinder spindle? The replacement one from Grizzly is about $55. I could make my own, since the wheels will be dressed on installation anyways. Not too sure how wheel mounting works.

I have my nice mill and lathe in another walled off section but I do have some other equipment in the same area as the grinder. Should I run dust collection at all times when running the grinder? I was looking at getting one of the grizzly floor units at ~1 HP with a 3 micron filter. Could split duty between the grinder and sand blaster that way too.
 
In grind shops they run ventilation to grinder room and individual exhaust ports at each machine (usually). If you run flood coolant, the dust is cut down considerably. Forgetting how abrasive the dust is to other machines, its my health that most concerns me. I am sensitive to dust , smoke, etc. I rarely operate grinder for more than half hour to hour at a time and wear a mask, run coolant most of time and use a dust collector with fine filter. Sadly my grinder shares room with other tools. I leave room for hour after grinding, let dust settle before returning unmasked. I can see no dust on other machines but I can feel it in my lungs if I am in room shortly after grinding with no mask on. You could not pay me to grind carbide or cobalt without mask on.

My grinder,Chevalier 618SP is different than yours, likely has different hubs but the general arrangement is the same. Hubs for 55 are a bargain, mine are 85 or 90. That grizzly air filter that runs about a grand looks nice, I probably ought to put it on wish list.
 
Do not make your own hubs unless of course you are an accomplished ID/OD grinder hand with access to a machine you haven't mentioned. Replacement grinder spindles aren't cheap, no sense in messing up the taper with home brewed adapters. If you didn't get them with the machine you're also going to need a hub puller and a set of hub wrenches.

I don't/won't wet grind on my machine (KO Lee 6x18") for two reasons. First, though it cuts down on dust considerably it also adds mist to the air. If I can smell it, I'm breathing it. Second, my dust collection system takes care of all the dry particles but adding oily mist would muck the filters up pretty quiclky. I don't want to add a mist collector to the system too. For the type of grinding I do a cold gun works fine when I'm worried about heat. I have nothing against others using coolant, I just don't need it.

$55 for a new hub isn't too bad. I've paid nearly as much for used ones on Ebay.
 
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I just looked up your grinder on Grizzly site, did you get a magnetic chuck?
 
No viewable manual on the Grizzly site. That is odd... 24 grit wheel that comes with the grinder also seems odd. Many or most surface grinders use adapters (wheel hubs) that have a spindle taper of 3 inches per foot, 1 inch diameter on the big end. The wheel size is 1 1/4" on the I. D. Sopko lists the most common one as model 200, (00200). There are many variations of wheel adapters, all expensive, some even more so.
http://www.wmsopko.com/products.htm
http://www.wmsopko.com/sopko_04_to_30_51_53.htm
There are many other styles, however, and yours may very well be different. Compare the drawings with what you have.
 
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