Quote Originally Posted by Kip View Post
Bingo, you got it Irving (I was thinking you were wanting to feed using the cross-slide) Gritted teeth and a gentle hand to the ready!! The aim of getting the grinding wheel as large as possible is to retain use of the contact area of the jaws.

The centre height etc is marginal...main thing is to get the wheel down the middle.

How far out is it at present?
As I understand it you open the jaws, lock with the retainer then feed the grinder into the middle. Spin the chuck up at a low RPM (easy with my VFD) then move the grinder sideways on the cross-feed until it contacts the spinning jaws. move in/out longtitudinally until no more sparks on any jaw. move sideways a few thou and repeat until all jaws look smooth and unpitted. Not sure the size of the wheel matters that much as the spinning chuck gives it an effectively circular cut on the radius of the chuck although it needs ideally to be large relative to the width of the jaw otherwise grasping small items might be tricky. The wheel must be smaller than the chuck internal opening, the one I have is about 18mm dia and the opening of the chuck is 23mm, so I'll be able to pass beyond the jaws. I think the rigidity of the mounting of the grinder body is critical if a good parallel cut is to be achieved, so I am thinking of using some 50 x 50 steel angle bolted down with T-bolts and a strap over...

Making the retainer is a problem right now tho. The solution I think is to holesaw a 22mm hole in some 1/4" Ali sheet and then cut into 3 segments as shown in the article, drill and slot, then bolt together and use a file to even the edges up (I can't use the mill yet, but maybe I'll wait a couple of weeks till I can - its nearly done).