If the price is right BUY IT! If you ever decide to get into folders, you're gona want one anyway. If nothing else, make it an investment thing....buy it, and sell it later when you need the money.

I have found that they are one of those tools that you may only need once and a while, but when you need one you really need one. And then, once you start using it, you start finding more applications that it is really handy for. Soon you don’t know how you lived without it. I lived fine for my entire career without a surface grinder, but now that I have one (for a price I couldn’t refuse) I can’t imagine why I lived without it.

You have to ask yourself when you think such a deal will come along again. You will find many uses for this tool.

Sweet. Thanks guys.

It's $400. It's huge. It runs like butter.

For knifemaking, would a mini-mill do everything this can do?

I've got a bench top mill-and no, it won't do what a surface grinder can do. I wish I had a surface grinder..... The ability to have material parallel and flat would be very nice. Particularly on folders, but other things, as well. Imagine forging some cool fittings, then throwing them on the surface grinder to true things up before making your slots, drilling, etc.-some really cool options. That's a steal on the price, even with the freight cost.

Jeremy

It plains the surface quite a bit slower than I imagined. My use case right now would be to surface mill hot rolled steel before stock removal. I haven't ventured into folders yet, but some day...

Buy it! Don't worry about the folders yet. Every knife needs a flat and parallel ricasso and the surface grinder will go a long way to make your life easier. Snap this one up for all of the reasons that have been listed in this thread.

Dan

What Daniel said - every knife needs a flat and parallel ricasso if it has one.

I also surface all my fittings.

And all my tooling and jigs that I make.

My surface grinder runs as much as my 2X72s.

The smartest thing i did was reduce my contact wheel to one inch.

As you learn to surface grind, you gradually bring the contact wheel across the work piece a small amount at a time.

There can sometimes be a great deal of variation in a 2" belt, which, basic math will tell you, is reduced by half as soon as you cut the wheel in half.

And it takes much less time to bring the 1" wheel across your work piece than a 2" wheel when you're only coming across a small amount per pass.

Gator belts are your friend here.

There are so many things I do with my surface grinder to fit up my knives that I can't even list them all here.

I use long shank end mills to drill my tang holes. If my hole end up a little tight, I just throw the knife on the surface grinder sideways and take a few thousandths off the tang.

Easy-peasy.

When your ricasso and tang are flat and parallel, you can clamp the knife in a perfectly flat jig, and with a height gauge find the exact and true center of your handle all around the profile.

Find the center of your fittings.

This is all by having and using a surface grinder.

I made arrangements today. It should be here next week.

How do you parallel your ricassos on it with all the tapers in a forged blade? Are you shimming it somehow?

Thanks for the advice guys.

It's a K. O. Lee S718H. However, if anyone has a smaller solution and they'd like to trade, let me know. For my purposes I think I'd rather have something that fits on a table top. My "shop" is a 2 car garage haha.

I want my tang and ricasso full flat and parallel.

At the first stage of truing everything up, I have no taper in the tang whatsoever. It is exactly the same thickness as the ricasso.

I think tapering a hidden tang is a waste of time. It accomplishes nothing as far as I can tell, and doesn't give me any advantage on my threaded take-down assembly.

If I want it thinner, I place it 90 degrees to the magnetic chuck and reduce it that way.

What the blade is doing is pretty much irrelevant.

Having the ricasso and tang fully flat and parallel makes it simple to clamp the blade to a granite surface plate so as to scribe the center grind line on the blade edge.

After grinding the cutting edge exactly in the center, you can then reduce your tang any way you choose to.

A surface grinder can be your friend in so many ways it's amazing to consider.

If you do need to shim something to get things lined up at the beginning, then do so.

I certainly do. Just keep in mind that shimming lifts your work piece up off the magnet and things can get tricky.

So as things were coming to a close, I realized that the motor on the back of the machine is 480, though he told me it was 220. I only have single phase 220. Getting a 3 phase converter isn't a big deal, but replacing the motor or converting 220 to 480 3 phase is significantly more expensive.

It's a 7x18 mill, it's large, perfect shape, all manual. 7 inch wheel.

He has it for sale for $400, and it'll cost $370 to freight it. I'm not sure the cost to convert it to work with my power.

My options are either convert it, or buy a new motor. Anyone out there with experience with motors think a single phase 220v motor will be enough HP to run it? I know my 8 inch grinder is only like 1 or 1.5HP and it runs fine, but I assume a surface grinder needs all the power it can get so it runs consistently.

Any advice? Should I still get it even at that price? It went from a "oh that's a steal for $400" to "oh that's probably gonna cost $1200 by the time it's all said and done..."

it is still significantly cheaper than the attachment Travis W. makes for a belt grinder. It includes a magnet, right? JUMP on it. I don't know if any VFD's can help with that conversion of power for the motor. Just a thought.

kc

The magnetic table on it is shot. But I don't think it's be too hard to fix with a few neodymium magnets.

Does anyone know if a single phase 220v motor is powerful enough to run something like this? It runs a 7 inch wheel.