Polyurethane vs. rubber contact wheels?

T

Travis Fry

Joined
Jun 11, 2010
Messages
489
I'm finally getting a big boy grinder, and replacing my hyperfast Bader BII with a VS Esteem. I wanted to have contact wheels on top and bottom of the platen because I use them for profiling and stuff. My current aluminum wheels skip too much to be very useful.

Anyway, I have the option to make these rubber or polyurethane. As far as I can tell, the only difference is that the poly wheels are ~45% cheaper and have a lower heat tolerance. I'm not sure how much this matters though, since they'll spend 95% of their time perfoming the function of regular platen wheels. Am I missing something? Are the incremental differences worth the extra money?
 
I have used poly at 70 duro and 90 duro both have held up as good as vulcanized rubber. Ive ground as fast as a 2hp 1740 rpm motor will let me with a 6 inch drive wheel and vfd at 2x and never even got the wheel warm. The people who melt a poly wheel are morons in my opinion. You would have to do like 10 passes, never dunking once, even then press hard enough to transfer enough heat through a very thick grinding belt. I grind bare handed or thin gloves so I would burn the holy hell out of myself long before it would get hot enough to melt the poly.
 
I've been using 8 and 3" poly wheels for 3 years and hogged a lot of steel on the 8" and there are no signs of melting
 
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