Many homeowners with an electric grinder wheel have no experience cleaning or dressing maintenance. It’s important to maintain a grinding wheel to achieve the best performance out of it. There is an easy way to get greater performance from your grinder wheel: clean the electric grinder wheel with dressing maintenance.
For electric grinder wheel dressing maintenance, place a cleaning dressing stone on the grinder tool rest. Then gently, but held firmly, bring the stone against the running grinder wheel. Hold the stone tight to the tool rest so it doesn’t chatter. Move the stone slowly back and forth across the face of the grinding wheel.
As the grinder wheel is used to grind miscellaneous materials in a household environment, the wheel will become clogged or filled with waste from whatever was being ground and needs cleaning, or dressing.
As the surface of the electric grinder wheel fills with waste, it causes more heat and removes less material as you grind. The heat from a clogged grinding wheel can take the temper out of what you are grinding, ruining the quality of the metal. Also, the clogged stone removes material much slower, making sharpening much more cumbersome.
Removal of foreign material from an electric grinder wheel is called dressing a wheel. There are a few types of electric grinder wheel dressing tools, from diamond tipped, wheeled surfacers and dressing stones.
As the stone removes some of the surface of the grinding wheel, it will clean the wheel so it will remove material straighter, cooler, cleaner and quicker than before. Be prepared for some dust.
This is particularly important when sharpening drill bits, because that requires ‘square grinding wheel corners’ and dressing the grinder wheel helps keep them that way.