diamond paste sharpening

Re: diamond paste sharpening

V Parisian

>Peter, I inquired of the machine shop around the corner from my place of business, it appears to be a specialty shop that you are looking for. They referred me to another local shop. My guess is that anyone rebuilding auto engines knows the shop you need. My $.02 worth.

Victor - back to work

Re: diamond paste sharpening

Dave Anderson Chester, NH

>As Victor said, very few regular production machine shops have a Blanchard grinder. Blanchard is a brand of planetary grinder and the name has become generic over the years just like kleenex. These machines specialize in producting extremely flat and planar surfaces and are most often used when there is a need to produce a sheet or blank of something that has 2 co-planar surfaces. With special tooling and setups, they are capable of holding tolerances in the +/-.00001" range and with extremely fine surface finishes in the 2-4u" range.

Re: diamond paste sharpening

Bruce, a MN Galoot

>If you can't find a blanchard grinder locally, find a machine shop that has a flywheel grinder. They're pretty darn good.

Bruce

clarification on plate surface preparation

bill tindall, E. TN

>Blanchard grinding is very cheap, which suited us. It is a way to quickly flatten a bunch of stuff at a time. So, someone in the business of making plates would first Blanchard grind the cast blanks to get them flat. It leaves a surface somewhat less than perfect for the finest diamond charging because the abrasive used is mega coarse and it leaves big scratches (your tools surfaces are all Blanchard ground, eg saws and jointers). On the other hand, these occasional deep scratches might be beneficial for removing the grinding gunge, so long as most of the plate doesn't have scratches so deep that the diamonds disappear into these scratches.

Maybe best for 1 micron diamond, which may be the only size you need, is to surface grind the cast iron. The metal to specify is "grey cast iron". Any machine shop can suface grind and it is quick if the material is already fairly flat. I have 1 plate surface ground and one Blanchard ground and there is not a lot of difference between them. I won't say none, but not so much that I prefer one to the other.

Milling the surface is only suitable for coarse diamond charging. As a test we milled a surface. It didn't cut well with 1micron, I think because the surface was too rough such that there was too little contact between tool surface and plate. However, I have made several small hones that I charge with 15 micron diamond for lathe tool honeing and they did fine with just a milled surface.

Alternate source of lapping substrate

Phil Smith

>Bill's post is a good summary of our experience on making plates.

However if you want to test the waters before jumping in, a relatively straight forward way is to look for an old hand plane and use the sole as the lapping plate. A no. 5 or larger plane should work fine. The diamond paste is available from essentially all of the metal working supply houses as well as some of the woodworking supply places.

Re: Alternate source of lapping substrate

peter kolb

>Thanks all. Very solid information. I will try to line up a machine

shop in the next few weeks and than order the cast iron blanks.

Thanks again peter in south central nj