Abstract
The diamond wheel with a diameter within several millimeters has the disadvantage that it is difficult to improve the surface roughness, because the circumferential speed of the wheel is slow and the number of grains on the wheel is low. To suppress the decrease in grain number, a thermoplastic resin was chosen as a bonding material. This material softens on heating and solidifies again when cooled. A method of returning the abrasive grains to the wheel with the possibility of dropout was developed using heat under grinding. In this paper, a newly developed thermoplastic resin-bonded diamond wheel and a conventional thermosetting resin-bonded diamond wheel were tested under the same conditions, and their performances were compared. The arithmetic-mean-deviation of the profile of the newly developed diamond wheel was 51% of the value of the conventional diamond wheel at the first stage of grinding. The wear volume of the new wheel was a 57% of the value of the conventional wheel.
