Abrasive - Choice of Abrasive

Choice of Abrasive

The shape, size and nature of the workpiece and the desired finish will influence the choice of the abrasive used. A bonded abrasive grind wheel may be used to commercially sharpen a knife (producing a hollow grind), but an individual may then sharpen the same knife with a natural sharpening stone or an even flexible coated abrasive (like a sandpaper) stuck to a soft, non-slip surface to make achieving a convex grind easier. Similarly, a brass mirror may be cut with a bonded abrasive, have its surface flattened with a coated abrasive to achieve a basic shape, and then have finer grades of abrasive successively appied culminating in a wax paste impregnated with rouge to leave a sort of "grainless finish" called, in this case, a "mirror finish".

Also, different shapes of adhesive may make it harder to abrade certain areas of the workpiece. Health hazards can arise from any dust produced (which may be ameliorated through the use of a lubricant) which could lead to silicosis (when the abrasive or workpiece is a silicate) and the choice of any lubricant. Besides water, oils are the most common lubricants. These may present inhalation hazards, contact hazards and, as friction necessarily produces heat, flammable material hazards.

An abrasive which is too hard or too coarse can remove too much material or leave undesired scratch marks. Besides being unsightly, scratching can have other, more serious effects. Excessive abrasion or the presence of scratches may:

• diminish or destroy usefulness (as in the case of scratching optical lenses and compact discs or dulling knives);
• trap dirt, water, or other material;
• increase surface area (permitting greater chemical reactivity such as increased rusting which is also affected by matter caught in scratches);
• erode or penetrate a coating (such as a paint or a chemical or wear resistant coating);
• overly quickly cause an object to wear away (such as a blade or a gemstone);
• increase friction (as in jeweled bearings and pistons).

A finer or softer abrasive will tend to leave much finer scratch marks which may even be invisible to the naked eye (a "grainless finish"); a softer abrasive may not even significantly abrade a certain object. A softer or finer abrasive will take longer to cut as tends to cut less deeply than a coarser, harder material. Also, the softer abrasive may become less effective more quickly as the abrasive is itself abraded. This allows fine abrasives to be used in the polishing of metal and lenses where the series of increasingly fine scratches tends to take on a much more shiny or reflective appearance or greater transparency. Very fine abrasives may be used to coat the strop for a cut-throat razors, however, the purpose of stropping is not to abrade material but to straighten the burr on an edge. The final stage of sharpening Japanese swords is called polishing and may be a form of superfinishing.

Different chemical or structural modifications may be made to alter the cutting properties of the abrasive.

Other very important considerations are price and availability. Diamond, for a long time considered the hardest substance in existence, is actually softer than fullerite and even harder aggregated diamond nanorods, both of which have been synthesised in laboratories but no commercial process has yet been developed. Diamond itself is expensive due to scarcity in nature and the cost of synthesising it. Bauxite is a very common ore which, along with corundum's reasonably high hardness, contributes to corundum's status as a common, inexpensive abrasive.

Thought must be given to the desired task about using an appropriately hard abrasive. At one end, using an excessively hard abrasive wastes money by wearing it down when a cheaper, less hard abrasive would suffice. At the other end, if too soft, abrasion does not take place in a timely fashion, effectively wasting the abrasive as well as any accruing costs associated with loss of time.