What coincidental timing.......
I'm building a Jer inspired grinder right now. I made a couple of changes to mine to suit my material, parts and different build methodology, and also made one bigger change in geometry to allow for a future surface grinding attachment.....As he says in his video, almost all of the other designs, travel inline with the belt, and that's pretty limiting for the width of stuff you can grind. I was going to mount mine underneath, perpendicular to the belt. Very similar table design to his with linear rails, but I have a few more details to work out before building it . I just wanted to future proof myself to make sure I could make it work with my design later as an add on, and that it would work in general with the perpendicular belt travel. Clearly it works great from his video, so that's very relieving to me. It's funny timing because he hasn't posted in a long time, and I recently went back and watched a bunch of his older videos on his belt grinder builds while wondering what happened to him.....
I'm sure glad he posted before I started building mine though, Jer's pretty clever and it looks like he already solved some issues I would have ran into with mine. His attachment allows for a lot more versatility than mine, but I'll have to weigh whether I actually need that or not. With all the other machining options I have in my shop, I'm not sure I really need it to do anything other than flat surfacing, so I'll probably stay the course. I will however make one change thanks to this video. I never think to use flexures. I've used them a couple times in fixture design at my old job, but I think Jer just solved a motion control issue I was pondering for my moving platton. I'll have to play around in cad, and see what I can come up with to fit the space I have, but it jogged my train of thought onto a different track that might work better......
Tomorrow actually looks like a clean slate day, so I'm hoping to get a lot more progress done on mine.
