Diamond Dresser

For Christmas a few months ago I made a diamond dressing tool for my brother in law.  He is a woodworker and uses his bench grinder for the initial sharpening of various wood working tools.

The tool is made up of 4 parts.  The body is a piece of steel with an angled lip (one on each side) that is used as a guide against the tool rest on the grinder.  It has a threaded hole for the diamond.  The diamond is an industrial diamond held in a steel rod – commonly used in surface grinding dressers, modified with threads along most of its length.  There is a lock nut and o-ring (to provide some cushion when tightening the nut down) and a handle nut to adjust the distance from the lip to the edge of the diamond.

The tool is useful for most sizes of standard bench grinders as the body has 2 different lip offsets.  The threaded diamond is also allows for generous positioning.

After giving him the tool I explained a few of the benefits of such a tool versus a traditional spur style tool:

• The amount of grinding wheel material removed is easily controlled as the distance on the single point tool is adjustable.
• A single point diamond tool does a better job at getting the wheel round in the first place.  This is because the forces involved are significantly less than traditional spur type tools, or even the newer T style diamond tools.  Forcing traditional tools up against the wheel isn’t a very steady process and the entire tool floats on the surface of the wheel.  In addition your hand can move back and forth with the high and low points on the wheel.  As such I’ve found single point tools create a wheel that is rounder, which helps with balancing.  (Grinder balancing always happens after a wheel has been dressed).
• Unlike spur tools or the cheap T style dressers a properly used diamond tool lasts a long time on a bench grinder and also is very durable for various wheel materials.

After Christmas I finished up a tool for Max over at the Joy of Precision:

I made up a full set of drawings of the tool if you would like to make one yourself:

Body – (Rev 01) Diamond – (Rev 01) Handle Nut – (Rev 01) Lock Nut – (Rev 01) Dressing Tool – (Rev 01)

I’ve also had a fair bit of interest in people asking if they could buy one of these tools.  I’m making up a number of them for others so if you are interested send me an email: justin@thecogwheel.net.  I’ll be posting additional information shortly.

As usual I made up a video of making the tool and it also shows how I use it: