A dressing tool is an important tool in the proper care and maintenance of any grinding wheel. Conditioning of grinding wheel ensures that it will perform at maximum efficiency and long service life. A dressing tool is, therefore key, to optimizing productivity and value for money of grinding wheels.
When it comes to dressing tools, consistency is most important. And dressing tools with synthetic diamonds offers unmatched consistency. Uniform particle sizes and hardness gives synthetic diamond tools a significant step up over the natural diamond.
Synthetic diamonds are available in a variety of close-tolerance sizes and shapes while natural diamond has limited shapes and have inconsistent sizes. The controllable shapes contribute to longer usable life and conditioning ability.
Synthetic diamonds are made under stringent conditions, making them less likely to have internal imperfections that natural diamonds tend to have. The imperfections speed up wear rate which, in turn, adversely affects conditioning ability.
A dressing tool works by opening the porosity of the grinding wheel. This makes the grinding wheel sharper. Both natural and synthetic diamonds develop wear flats over time. However, the inconsistent shape of natural diamonds makes it prone to developing excessive wear flats that can dull the grinding wheel instead of sharpening it. Natural diamond dressing tools require indexing to control wear flats. Indexing interrupts the production.
The wear flats on synthetics, on the other hand, remain under control without indexing. Therefore, downtimes are minimized and production is maximized.
Synthetic diamond dressing tools come at a price. But its benefit in terms of improved productivity generally outweighs its cost.
