Wet grinding clutch disks????

I have been cutting my disks for years on a lathe dry with a diamond insert.I use a shop vac to keep the dust down still messy .I picked up a nice flywheel grinder cheap. Will grinding them wet with a water soluble cutting fluid hurt them also will i see any difference from the turned groove surface to rotary ground finish.I use bronze floaters and wear about .005 a run

 

We've tried cutting them wet in our big blanchard here once.. They didn't much care for that, we used as little as a .5% solution, water soluble. The material is porous by nature and it gets in every nook and cranny, dropped our coefficient of friction on the dyno by about 25% and made some cool smoke clouds.

Most of the Fuel teams have the Van Norman grinders with them everywhere they go, some keep them in the trailers and use a shop vac held in place near the stone and it is extremely effective. When you grind them, the particles removed are usually a lot smaller and lighter than they are with the lathe style, so the shop vac really kicks ass when grinding. A lot of them also use diamond wheels when grinding the discs... Will you notice a difference? Hard to say. I think grinding usually puts a smoother finish on the disc, but can also work-harden them as you cut. Unless you had flatness issues one way versus another, I'll go ahead and bet you don't see much of a difference. Usually a burnout is enough to go back to making all things equal again.

 

Just curious. Do you use an expanding mandrel on the ID or made up a tooling to support the face?

 

Have a 12in dia aluminum face plate has a post that locates the id of the splines.Then bolt a cap that rests on the hub only tighten finger tight so not to distort the disk. Works great just make a mess of the lathe

 

Discs

Do you do floaters as well on the lathe, or just the discs?

This sounds interesting, I may look at doing something like your setup.

Thanks

Corey

 

can't do floaters that way i used a surface grinder with coolant at the shop for them