Common Fluting Mistakes — and How to Fix Them
Flute Polish or Flute Burnish?
There is an increasing need for high-quality carbide mills and drills with polished flute faces. Your customers are demanding a surface grinding tool that has a shiny flute, evacuates a metal chip better, and runs at faster speeds.
Sometimes your customer just wants your tool to look like the “other guy’s” tool. Unfortunately, a burnished flute face can be mistaken for true polish. Toolmakers have the challenge of making a cost-effective tool that has great performance and a great finish on the flute face.
Common Fluting Mistakes
Some toolmakers turn to hybrid wheels that grind the flute in no time, but these grinding wheels really don’t polish all that well.
To improve appearances and achieve a smooth finish, a lot of toolmakers use nonwoven products to polish after fluting. But do flute polishing cloths really polish, or do they just burnish the surface?
For a Quality Flute Polish
For a flute cleaning and polishing that really penetrates the surface, you have to remove some material to get through the grind lines leftover after flute grinding.
A resin bonded grinding wheel can give you a finish that is as good or better than nonwoven polishing products, but the resin bonded wheel also removes material from the flute face, taking out subsurface damage.
Resin bond is made by mixing abrasive grit with a phenolic resin. The resulting compound is molded to shape before being baked in an oven. This produces a grinding wheel that's tough, with the resilience to take impacts without shattering. By adding copper and other fillers to the resin base, grinding wheel manufacturers can tailor the properties of the finished grinding wheel to a wide variety of applications.
With resin bond, you can make a tool that not only looks just as good as the “other guy”, but also is actually better quality than the other guy. Resin-bonded superabrasive grinding wheels provide:
Shock-resistance
Excellent surface finish
Low maintenance
The Extra Effort Sets You Apart
The right wheel can help you polish up your act. CDT’s resin bond flute polishing wheel performs as good as it looks — producing a quality tool that shows. We offer resin bond polishing wheels to work in oil or emulsion on all CNC cutter grinders. These grinding wheels can run at high speeds and are available in grits as fine as 1200 or more based on finish requirements.
Grinding wheel manufacturers have years of experience and there are few fluting applications we haven't encountered. Our engineers can help you get the right grinding and polishing solution for your particular application.