One of the ongoing projects is to get all of the machine tools set up and running. A number of years ago I bought a small surface grinder.  It sat around neglected for quite some time.  A couple months ago I built a bench for it and got it mounted.  Today I finally got around to actually  giving it a once over and seeing if it would work.

It looked like everything was where it should be although I wasn’t sure about how the motor was wired up.  It looked like it might turn in the wrong direction.   Well I couldn’t put it off any longer so I plugged it in and turned it on to see if the wheel would explode and if it would run in the correct direction.  Surprise, it all head together and seemed to be running properly.    Feeling optimistic I adjusted the diamond dressing tool and dressed the wheel.  So far so good, so I then took light passes on the magnetic chuck to level it out.   That went rather smoothly so I grabbed a small scrap of steel and proceeded to flatten one side then the other.  It takes a while as small passes are required not to heat up the work piece or bog down the 1/6th HP motor.  Once I had both sides smooth I took it off and measured it with my non vernier micrometer.  This one only reads to a thousandth of an inch or .001 I have a pair that reads to a ten-thousandth, .001, but the less accurate ones were more readily available.   The result is that i couldn’t measure a difference across the 2+ inch length of the piece.

The verdict is that the surface grinder is up and running.  There is some work I should do on the wiring and it needs  some more clean up, but I decided to go for running well enough over perfect.

So how flat is flat 😉