Influence of grinding parameters on the quality of high content PCBN cutting inserts

Plunge-face grinding is commonly used to finish PCBN cutting inserts. In order to reach an adequate process design, an investigation of the influence of the grinding parameters on the quality of high content PCBN inserts is carried out in this work. For this, the inserts are ground with different grinding wheels (including a variation of grain size and bonding), dressing feed rates, feed and cutting speeds and the edge chipping and flank face roughness are measured. It was found that a reduction of the abrasive grain size as well as an increase of the dressing feed rate lead to an improvement of the insert edge and surface quality. Moreover, a variation of the cutting and feed speeds has only a small influence on the PCBN insert quality.