Design, manufacture and industrial validation of an electro discharge dresser for metal bond CBN wheels

In this paper, the design and manufacturing of a CBN metal bonded grinding wheel electro discharge dresser is presented. It is known the difficulty of dressing this type of grinding wheels by conventional methods, therefore the dressing method presented is based in the Electro Discharge Machining (EDM) process. The difficulty in the dressing carries principally two kinds of problems. The first one is the initial run out (Trmal and Holesovsky) in the mounting of a grinding wheel on the machine spindle; the second one consists in the little exposure of the CBN grains at the first moment. The design of the presented dresser solves both problems in an effective way. The technologies and parameters necessary to carry out the dressing in an optimal way are presented, as well as the steps followed to obtain them. Two prototypes of the dresser have been manufactured and tested in a conventional surface grinding machine (model KAIR T400 × 180) and in a CNC surface grinding centre DANOBAT MT-41 CF.