surface grinder jig for KMG ?

[SVanderkolff]

I have the KMG 10 and was thinking of trying to rig something to turn it into a surface grinder. I was wondering if anyone else has tried this.

Thanks
Steve

[Ray Rogers]

I don't know if anyone else tried it but I have thought of it. If you look down the page in this forum you'll see a thread called Surface grinder problem. It involves converting a regular surface grinder to use belts. The bottom line is that most people who have tried that discovered that a normal contact wheel is too soft to be used for surface grinding. If you got one of the hard urethane wheels mentioned in that thread and fitted it to your KMG you might have a good starting point. Getting good results with a surface grinder depends a lot on the weight and rigidity of the machine as well as the ability to apply the abrasive to the target in very small increments, say .001" . Even with the right wheel you'll have a lot of work to do. Keep us posted on your progress if you decide to go for it........

[PeterAtwood]

I did this two years ago. It seemed like such a doable thing but my rendition wasn't quite there. It worked after a fashion but not as well as I would have liked.

What I did was take a heavy duty drawer slide from Home Depot and bolted the rails onto either side of a length of aluminum channel and sandwiched that between a couple of lengths of aluminum angle stock. The flat side of the channel formed the bed that would go back and forth.

I made a couple of cross braces and off of one of them I mounted some more aluminum angle to attach to the spare KMG tooling arm I had. The whole thing mounted vertically in front of the contact wheel. I added a handle on the front so you could move it up and down against the wheel. The all tapped screw construction made it fairly rigid and it actually did work. The problem I had with it was that there was no provision for fine tuning in and out and even worse, it would have been very easy to mount it off square. That and I had to attach the steel with double sticky tape. I was thinking some rare earth magnets mounted in the bed might be the hot ticket.

I know this can be done but I just don't have the machinery chops to do it. I will snap a pic or two if I get a chance....