Good afternoon Sorriso:
There is lots to know about how to set it up and use it to make accurate profiles on your grinding wheels and also to preserve the very expensive accurate diamond point that does the dressing.
As you probably know, the Diaform is a pantograph dresser so it relies on a template that is followed with a stylus.
So it follows that both the stylus and the template must be accurate, but the diamond must be an accurate scaled down reproduction of the stylus and it must be mounted in the proper place on the dresser arm so that a movement of the stylus is accurately reproduced at the scaling factor of the Diaform.
In order to reach the entire geometry of the template, the diamond can be swung using the dresser arm, and therefore the radiused tip of the diamond must be perfectly concentric with the axis of the swing arm within microns.
If you need an accurate profile on your wheel you MUST make this step, and there is a procedure to do so that involves a micron precision dial indicator and moving the diamond on the swing arm until it is clocks in with zero runout as you swing the arm back and forth.
Once you have your Diaform set up the next thing you need to learn is the proper technique to use it.
If you have a table mounted Diaform you need to set up the diamond's position relative to the wheel axis so the center of the finishing diamond is directly underneath the grinder spindle axis..
If you have a spindle mounted unit you do not need to bother... the permanent mounting on the machine spindle housing takes care of that.
Once you have your Diaform properly located on the machine, you have to learn the technique to dress the wheel without wrecking the diamonds, particularly the finishing diamond.
There are (as you may have gathered) a pair of diamonds, one is directly behind the other separated by about an inch (25 mm).
The front one is normally the roughing diamond, and most operators use a damaged or worn out diamond to do the roughing.
You try to get as close as you can to your final wheel shape with the rougher...25 microns or better is what you hope for, so that the finisher can do its work with minimal wear of the diamond.
You do it by stroking the rougher over the wheel so the point is always trailing as much as possible, and you drop the wheel toward the diamond in 25 micron (0.001) increments (with a table mounted unit), taking as much of the wheel surface as you can dress with each increment and poking the diamond into every corner by swinging it as necessary to rotate the tip so it can reach in and pick out the details.
This picking out process is abusive to the diamond and is when all the damage occurs to the precision lapped radius on the diamond's tip.
Eventually you will get to the point where the roughing diamond has covered all of the surface of the wheel that you need to form dress.
You then shift to the finishing diamond, back off the wheel by 25 microns or so and then repeat the process in 5 micron increments until your entire profile is contactetd by the finishing diamond.
That's the basic process.
However:
There are other details of use that will get your profile onto the wheel in the proper place.
There are profiles you cannot dress.
There are profiles you may have to do parts of onto opposite sides of the wheel or on successive wheels, and if you use the "both corners of the wheel" strategy, it's useful to know exactly where those two profiles are relative to one another.
All that stuff is sort of the "advanced" course on using your Diaform.
It becomes relevant when you are form dressing die profiles or gear profiles for example, where you need to work to very tight tolerances.
I don't know how complicated or accurate your work is, but you should have a pretty good sense of it with this quickie course, and the rest of it will come with experience.
Cheers
Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
Vancouver Wire EDM -- Wire EDM Machining
