I'm looking for a surface grinder at the moment. I'm hoping to get a 6x18 with hydraulic control, but am looking for the right deal on th eright machine. I haven'r run one in 20 years but I think there's some errors posted above. A couple folks mentioned taking cuts of only a half thousandth at a time and grinding a blade in two passes. From what I remember from school and a few months working in a grinding room, you should easily be able to take a .003 - .005 cut on a properly set up machine without burning, but you have to take cuts in small increments on the Y axis. IIRC, on a machine with automatic feeds, you set the rate of cross travel feed rate and the depth of the cut and let the machine do the rest. It feeds the table over a little bit at a time in the Y axis while the table moves back and forth on the X axis bringing the workpiece under the wheel. You generally never take a cut using the full witdth of the face of the wheel on a single cut. That seems like a sure way to burn the steel and bog the motor and would elplain why you can only take a .0005 at a time. These same principals should hold true on a manual machine as well. Surface grinding is a slow and tedious process but can yield tremendous precision when done correctly.
John
