The DM-9CNC Wheel Dressing Machine allows a grinding wheel to be contour dressed offline using a fully programmable single diamond or rotary diamond roll. Having the ability to dress wheels offline allows the wheels to be ready for production, reducing setup time and improving machine efficiency.
Current Process:
The wheel is dressed on the grinding machine during setup or using a manually held contour dresser. Contour dressers require a skilled operator who moves a stylus along a metal template of the ball form as a single point diamond removes material from the wheel.
Challenges:
Dressing the wheel on the grinder reduces OEE and increases setup time, delaying production. Manual Template Tracing is operator dependent and inconsistent, which affects the quality of the grind, increases scrap rates, and requires more frequent dressing which shortens the life of the wheel. Deliver a process to dress the work wheel for a 1″ diameter ball. The process has to improve OEE, reduce setup time, and improve consistency.
Solution:
DM-9CNC Wheel Dressing Machine
The DM-9CNC is a standalone machine allowing operators to dress grinding wheels while the grinder is in production. Available for 9″ and 10″ grinding wheels, the machine CNC dresses precision contours in vitrified grinding wheels. The shape is transferred from a CAD drawing into G-code, which the DM-9CNC can read to shape the wheel. The dress roller is powered by a brushless servo motor. It offers high torque and closed-loop velocity control up to 10,000 RPM.
Grinding wheels can be dressed offline, then stored for production, reducing setup time and increasing machine efficiency.
Once set up, the DM-9CNC can run unmanned, shaping a wheel for a 1″ ball in four hours. This allows the manufacturers to run their grinder while dressing a wheel at the same time.
The Glebar Tooling Department uses the DM-9CNC to dress wheels for customers when purchasing a machine isn’t practical.
Wheel contour can be generated with CAD/CAM software packages or entered directly as linear and circular positions on the 15″ touchscreen HMI.
Servo-driven slides feature 0.000004” (0.1 µm) glass scale feedback for accurate positioning generating a more consistent dress.
Linear encoders are attached to the slide ensuring accurate positioning and that the resulting contours are always true to form.
In addition to spheres, a multitude of shapes can be produced using this technique from fuse bodies, to ceramic injectors, to arthroscopic devices.
