"Ted Edwards" wrote in message
...
Harold & Susan Vordos wrote:

My personal choice has always been with a dressing stick.

I'm not familiar with those. How to they compare to a diamond dresser?

Ted

For dressing wheels on a pedestal grinder, they are far superior. Diamonds
leave a wheel very smooth, necessitating greater pressure be applied to get
good grinding action. Wheels so dressed are very poor for grinding tool
steels. You might say that the wheel starts behaving like a bearing
instead of a grinding wheel. A dressing stick, being softer than diamond,
will remove bits by breaking the bond instead of cutting them like a diamond
does. That yields a far better (slightly rougher) surface for off hand
grinding, yet it is easy to get the wheel running true and flat.

Diamond dressed wheels cut very hot as compared to those dressed by a star
dresser. On machine tools with rigid setups and flood coolant, that's not
an issue. The problems of a star dresser have already been discussed, so
what you get is a compromise of the two when you use a dressing stick.
Dressing sticks are generally made of silicon carbide (or they may be boron
carbide) and resemble a hand stone, usually about an inch square, six inches
long, very coarse, perhaps 24 grit, and not expensive. The only negative
effect of using one is that they have a slight tendency to dull abrasive
grains that do not get knocked off the wheel. The surface they yield is
a good offset, though, so they are a good dressing device, especially for
grinding HSS. I highly recommend one for any shop.

Harold