Whether you’re manufacturing metal tools, furniture structures or engineering components, grinding is an important service. Precise, accurate and expertly finished, any manufacturer will benefit from a quality grinding service. Choosing a grinding service depends on knowing your product, your needs and the best people to get the job done. In this article, we’ll explain how to choose a grinding service.
Key Factors to consider when choosing your Grinding Partner
- Range of services
- Experience
- Equipment
- Turnaround time
- Cost
Capabilities & Range of Services
Manufacturers can save money when subcontracting by combining services. When sending parts for grinding, you may benefit from multiple types of grinding as well as surface finishes and plating. Choose a provider that can offer both grinding and finishing to reduce turnaround times.
Universal Grinding
Universal Grinding machines have grinding wheels on multiple axes, providing internal and external grinding and operating at any angle. This service helps shape angles, end faces and spherical parts. Universal grinders can execute both cylindrical and non-cylindrical grinding operations, creating round and flat shapes.
Learn more about Universal Grinding
Surface Grinding
Precision surface grinding is a key step in component manufacture and finish, as the surface and size of parts can determine their success. For all flat, external surfaces, this service can shape and finish parts quickly and accurately.
Learning more about Surface Grinding
Plating: Hard Chrome & Metal Spraying
Adding a metallic layer to components can improve their mechanical properties. Hard chrome plating improves the longevity, durability, corrosion resistance and appearance of components, while metal spraying applies thicker layers and a broader range of metals.
Choosing a grinding company that offers these additional services in-house can shorten your production cycle. Grinding, plating, and spraying are often used in combination to create precise, durable components.
Experience & Expertise
Choose a grinding company with experience working across multiple industries. These companies are often more flexible and adaptive than those which specialise in a particular sector.
It’s also important that your chosen grinding company can take on the volume of work you require. If their facility is too small, it will lengthen lead times and could even lead to inconsistent results.
Davies Precision Grinding provides large volume grinding services for many industries, including aerospace, automotive, medical and tool manufacturing.
Technology & Tolerances
Up-to-date machinery is essential for both accuracy and speed. A quality grinding service provider will invest in new machinery and technology, such as CNC grinders, that can keep up with manufacturing demand today.
Newer grinding technology often offers tighter tolerances. At Davies Precision Grinding, our CNC grinding equipment can work to +/- 3 microns of the specified dimension.
Using computer numerical control (CNC), CNC Grinding machines are preprogrammed to remove excess material, ensuring extreme accuracy and controlled action, even when working with small parts. The programme can be run multiple times to provide large volumes of identical end products.
Equipment Capacity
It’s important to choose a service that can handle the sizes you require. You can check machine capacities on most websites or by enquiring.
Our universal grinding machines can manage diameters up to 620mm, bores up to 500mm and up to lengths of 2500mm on centre.
Turnaround Time and Reliability
When choosing a grinding company, make sure you enquire as to their expected lead times. You may find their ideal turnaround time online, but a direct enquiry can receive an updated estimate based on their current workload and scheduling.
Get Three Quotes
Standard business practice is to request quotes from three providers and compare the costs with the benefits. You can request a quote for our services through our contact form.
Questions to Ask a Grinding Service Provider
When you make a grinding enquiry, you can ask directly about the factors that will help you choose a grinding company.
Share your product requirements when enquiring to make sure you get the most relevant information. Larger capacity machines usually can’t achieve tolerances as tight as the smallest machines designed for micro-grinding.
Ask potential providers about:
- Tolerances: Specify your requirements and part dimensions.
- Internal and External Grinding: Some companies only provide surface grinding, while others can offer boring and internal diameters.
- Lead times: Some companies will offer accurate timelines based on current workload, while others will give a generalised idea.
- References or case studies: You can often find galleries of previous work on company websites, but you can request references or case studies to get a better idea of their capabilities before you commit.
Based on the responses you receive, you can make an informed decision about which grinding company is most reliable and capable for your part type.
Davies Precision Grinding: Friendly, Experienced Service
Davies Precision Grinding Ltd offer confidence, skills and friendly customer service for any grinding job within our machines’ capacity. Whether it’s a batch job or a single-item refurbishment, our grinding services have excellent lead times.
Our friendly service and experienced team are the reasons people keep coming back. We explain everything up front and answer all your questions, because we know not everyone is an expert.