As the wheel turns – caring for your grinding wheel

Grind­ing wheels are com­mon­place in just as many work­shops as they are in indus­tri­al set­tings. The rules for car­ing for your grind­ing wheel, a frag­ile piece of machin­ery, seem to be sim­i­lar whether grind­ing is a hob­by or you have an entire fleet of grind­ing robots at your disposal.

As men­tioned above, grind­ing wheels, whether hand­held or robot­ic end effec­tors are frag­ile. Because of this, it is easy to chip them if some­thing unex­pect­ed hits them or gets into their path.

The first thing you should do when get­ting a new grind­ing wheel is to inspect the wheel itself. That is one of the most impor­tant steps to grind­ing wheel care. If there are chips in your grind­ing wheel, the life of it is con­sid­er­ably decreased, accord­ing to an arti­cle from Yahoo​.com.

Also, a cracked wheel is a com­plete loss, and should be returned to the man­u­fac­tur­er for refund. There is no way that a cracked grind­ing wheel can be cared for or repaired. Man­u­fac­tur­ers should nev­er allow an oper­a­tor to use a cracked grind­ing wheel or allow it to be attached to the grind­ing robot. The site stat­ed that a cracked wheel could break at any time, which could injure the robot oper­a­tor, the robot or the work piece itself.

Anoth­er step in the care of your grind­ing wheel is to make sure it is prop­er­ly stored. Hand­held grind­ing wheels should be stored in a sep­a­rate draw­er, and nev­er left out where they can be dropped or dam­aged. It is the same for grind­ing robot end effec­tors. These items, if they are inter­changed for oth­er end effec­tors on the same robot, should be stored some­where safe where they will not have the chance of being damaged.

Rou­tine pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance is the best way to prop­er­ly care for your grind­ing wheel over time. It is through this pre­ven­ta­tive care that you will know if the grind­ing wheel has become chipped or cracked dur­ing use. If this hap­pens, it is time to replace your grind­ing wheel.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor for Fanuc, Motoman, ABB, Uni­ver­sal Robots, and KUKA grind­ing robots, has part­ner­ships with sev­er­al grind­ing end effec­tor mer­chants, and because of those part­ner­ships, has access to many dif­fer­ent grind­ing wheel mod­els for your robot­ic needs.

If you are inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about car­ing for grind­ing wheels, or about auto­mat­ed grind­ing in gen­er­al, con­tact Robots​.com online or at 740−251−4321.