Trevanion
Member
- Messages
- 50
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
Overall a bit of an unusual topic for a metalworking forum, but I thought I'd get some better answers here than I would on woodworking forums because there are very few people doing this sort of work in-house anymore to ask for advice.
To explain my query, not particularly often but sometimes you require a bespoke profile in timber typically to replicate existing profiles in a historic property, there are a number of ways of going about this but most architectural joiners will use bespoke ground cutters on a spindle moulder and these days will outsource this work to companies like Whitehill tooling who will grind a set of cutters to a drawing or sample moulding sent in the post. This is fine but you do require a lot of back-and-forth communication with these companies to ensure they produce the correct profile, and then you have to wait for the cutters to arrive which can take over a week, and then there's the cost of the cutters which for bespoke profiles are upwards of £60 a pair and twice as much if you include a set of limiters which are required for hand-fed work by law. This can make short runs of mouldings extraordinarily expensive by the time you factor in a set of cutters and the time spent liaising with the company, the actual timber cost, preparation, and running the moulding is comparatively a small portion of the cost in short runs.
I personally grind my own cutters out of lengths of HSS planer knife (50mm x 4mm x 1m long) which doesn't take particularly long, perhaps a couple of hours per set if you're working off a drawing and an hour if you have an existing moulding to match off, the cutter material itself costs peanuts by comparison, it's about £5 for a pair of 50mm tall cutters. Now, technically what I do is illegal according to the HSE because I'm using an older unlimited style of tooling, but we'll keep that between us.
What I'm struggling with is grinding wheels, I've been using coarse White Alox wheels on an 8" grinder which work well enough, but I find they wear very quickly particularly at the corners which makes getting sharp definitions in a moulding quite difficult without constantly dressing the wheel. I'd really like a wheel that's harder and leaves a finer finish but I'm left confused by some of the jargon when it comes to wheels, there seem to be so many different types and specifications that aren't really explained clearly. I've been looking at https://www.abtec4abrasives.com which is where I've had my wheels in the past but trying to understand specifications like "WA 54 MV" or "2GB 46 KV" is quite challenging, unless I'm missing something obvious.
To explain my query, not particularly often but sometimes you require a bespoke profile in timber typically to replicate existing profiles in a historic property, there are a number of ways of going about this but most architectural joiners will use bespoke ground cutters on a spindle moulder and these days will outsource this work to companies like Whitehill tooling who will grind a set of cutters to a drawing or sample moulding sent in the post. This is fine but you do require a lot of back-and-forth communication with these companies to ensure they produce the correct profile, and then you have to wait for the cutters to arrive which can take over a week, and then there's the cost of the cutters which for bespoke profiles are upwards of £60 a pair and twice as much if you include a set of limiters which are required for hand-fed work by law. This can make short runs of mouldings extraordinarily expensive by the time you factor in a set of cutters and the time spent liaising with the company, the actual timber cost, preparation, and running the moulding is comparatively a small portion of the cost in short runs.
I personally grind my own cutters out of lengths of HSS planer knife (50mm x 4mm x 1m long) which doesn't take particularly long, perhaps a couple of hours per set if you're working off a drawing and an hour if you have an existing moulding to match off, the cutter material itself costs peanuts by comparison, it's about £5 for a pair of 50mm tall cutters. Now, technically what I do is illegal according to the HSE because I'm using an older unlimited style of tooling, but we'll keep that between us.
What I'm struggling with is grinding wheels, I've been using coarse White Alox wheels on an 8" grinder which work well enough, but I find they wear very quickly particularly at the corners which makes getting sharp definitions in a moulding quite difficult without constantly dressing the wheel. I'd really like a wheel that's harder and leaves a finer finish but I'm left confused by some of the jargon when it comes to wheels, there seem to be so many different types and specifications that aren't really explained clearly. I've been looking at https://www.abtec4abrasives.com which is where I've had my wheels in the past but trying to understand specifications like "WA 54 MV" or "2GB 46 KV" is quite challenging, unless I'm missing something obvious.