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Centerless grinding services

Centerless grinding services at Midwest Metal Fabrication.

Centerless grinding is an abrasive machining process by which small chips of material are removed from the external surface of a cylindrical metallic or nonmetallic workpiece. This process relies on the relative rotations of the grinding wheel and regulating wheel to rotate the workpiece. The process does not require chucking or locating the workpiece between centers for rotation.

To view details about Midwest Metal Fabrication’s centerless grinding services, please select one of the links below:

• Grinding overview
• Centerless grinding process characteristics
• Materials
• Workpiece geometry/shapes
• Setup and equipment
• Tool style
• Tool materials
• Part sizes
• Tolerances
• Complementary services

Grinding overview

Midwest Metal Fabrication offers centerless grinding services to customers requiring their fabricated parts or components receive grinding to remove small bits and pieces adhering to the surface of a cylindrical metallic or nonmetallic workpiece.

Centerless grinding process characteristics

• Requires no chucking or mounting of the workpiece
• Produces close tolerances and smooth surfaces
• Is applicable for cylindrical, stepped, formed, and conical workpieces
• Is most efficient for through-feed operations
• Requires coolant
• Is primarily a finishing process

Materials

Midwest Metal Fabrication’s operators commonly centerless grind steel and aluminum.

We can also centerless grind T1 and T2 aluminum, various aluminum alloys, copper, cold rolled steel, hot rolled steel, high strength, low alloy, steel, and various steel alloys.

Workpiece geometry/shapes

Workpiece shapes that can be machined include plain cylindrical shapes, surfaces with radii and fillets, stepped parts, and tapered surfaces. Centerless grinding normally reduces the surface roughness from 8-32 microinches.

The geometry produced on the workpiece is a mirror image of the grinding wheel shape.

Setup and equipment

Midwest Metal Fabrication centerless grinding equipment consists of a grinding wheel, a regulating wheel, a work rest blade, and coolant capabilities.

Tool style

Tools are available in a wide range of shapes depending on the application. Commonly used tools include:

• Straight,
• Tapered, and
• Formed grinding wheels.

Tool materials

We use the common abrasive materials for centerless grinding wheels. These include:

• Aluminum oxide - best for most steels and steel alloys with high volume applications.
• Silicon carbide - good for cast iron, nonferrous and nonmetallic materials with the added bonus of lower costs.
• Diamond - either natural or man-made used for carbide grinding and nonmetallic materials.
• Cubic boron nitride - the best for high speed steel and which provides a long life bit very high costs.

Part sizes

Midwest Metal Fabrication uses centerless grinding on fabricated parts or components as small as 1” W x 4” L x 1/4” H up to parts that are 12” W x 48” L x 6” H.

Tolerances

Our Midwest Metal Fabrication personnel can achieve tolerances of +/- 0.001” for diameter and +/- 0.002” for roundness during centerless grinding processes.

Complementary services

We offer drilling, turning, milling, tapping, and grooving among other complementary machining services for our custom fabricated metal parts or components.

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Call us today at 1-219-931-3131, email us at sales@midwestmetalfabrication.com, or send a fax using 1-219-844-8512 to get a quick quote to help solve your heavy gauge steel fabricating problems.