cal jobs in the shop at any time could be centerless grinding bar stock, grinding pins for hard drives on the same machine, a few hours later on the same machine, repairing a large roller, while thread-grinding titanium bone screws in another.
The moment you realize even high precision is affordable. This is the moment we work for.
“We started as a tool-grinding shop and gradually expanded into centerless, cylindrical, and thread grinding. Eventually, we added machines for flat grinding, honing and lapping. Current- ly, we provide centerless, cylindrical, thread grinding, lapping, honing, double-disk grinding, Blanchard and surface grinding, as well as some CNC lathe and Swiss work,” David Schranck, HR/IT manager explains.
Harnessing Precision Grinding Workhorses in Minnesota Grinding’s stable are four Studers—an S20, two S40s, and a new S33—from United Grinding Technologies (UGT; Miamis- burg, OH). “We found the rigidity of the Studers key to our precision and repeat- ability requirements, and the service we’ve received from UGT, the technical support, whether it’s helping with a pro- gramming issue or just fixing or adjusting the machine—has been remarkable,” says Gibbs. “Those are the best things about Studer grinders. They are very rigid and run forever. The S20, for example, has been running for 24 years. It still runs today, every day. We run the grind- ers five days a week, 24 hours a day,” Gibbs says.
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The parts they’ve been grinding have tolerances of ±0.0001 to 0.0004" (0.003–0.010 mm), with an 8–16 RA. “They tackle just about any material, from aluminum, titanium, Hastelloy, stainless, Inconel, carbide, plastic— pretty much the whole gamut. We just had a job that was made out of Rhenium, an exotic, very expensive material for an aerospace coupler requiring ID, OD, and thread grinding,” Gibbs says. “There are some parts that we can put on the S33 and grind the OD, the face, and an ID in one chucking, where- as we used to have to put this same part on three different grinders to do the one job,” Gibbs says. “Plus, the S33