Hi texas385:
The short answer is: "it depends".
I know that sounds like a bullshit cop out, but it's not.
What it depends on is the complexity of the form on the end of the pin.
If no elaborate dressing is required, it's faster and simpler to spin grind it.
If it's some weirdass profile like a sucker pin or worse, it's easier to turn unless it needs some nutso form tool or super fragile full radius blade that has to be wire EDM cut first.
I have both an Optidress and a Diaform, so I can dress most forms but what a royal PITA for only one or two pins.
If there's more it starts to look a little less daunting and more worthwhile.
Sometimes you can crush dress your shape easily, but not often.
Finally hard turning a pin is not that difficult unless the aspect ratio is awful...they're not that hard, as David Scott points out.
This is one of the very few times I'm going to disagree with EmanuelGoldstein about what machines to use. (sorry Emanuel...will we still be friends do you think?)
I find normal cylindrical grinders to be a real PITA for this sort of work because they're so clumsy and run big expensive wheels that you really don't want to form dress the shit out of if you can avoid it..
The best I ever used was a Brown and Sharpe #13...nice because it can run small wheels that I can dress on another grinder and then just pop onto the B&S, still on the hub it was dressed on.
A shop I worked at had a setup like that...it's so long ago that I can't remember what the other grinder was but it was a B&S too (Micromaster maybe??) so the wheel hubs were interchangeable.
Worked like a hot damn, but it was still a pain to dress the wheels even with the Optidress and the profile projector that surface grinder had on it.
But many of the guys still just ran the pins with the spin fixture on the surface grinder...even with the B&S #13 in the shop.
If there was only a few pins to do, they couldn't be bothered to move the wheel to the other grinder and they really liked the profile projector on the machine.
A Cincinatti Monoset is another grinder I'd happily have in the shop for this kind of work...same reason I like the B&S #13.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com