Gyro Trac / Cimaf Owners

fishfactor · Aug 16, 2012

This is what happens when you have hours upon hours sitting in the cab of a mulcher to think of ways to make your life easier. I figured there must be a way to keep a factory like edge on the teeth/knives and came up with this. This is a crude prototype thrown together in a hour. It holds a 8" bench grinder. The angle is adjustable, and gravity keeps pressure on the tooth since the grinder slides on the 2 long bolts. It uses the tooth bolt and the bite control discs on the drum as reference points to assure a consistent angle. If we ever get another slack day I'll make everything on the mill and clean it up a bit, but for now it might be ugly but it works. It takes less than 10 seconds to move the jig to the next tooth. Once any large dings in the tooth are smooth you can walk away and come back in about a minute to move it to the next tooth.

This is a freshly sharpened tooth that has 63 hours on it.

Robbie Hegwood · Aug 17, 2012

That is awesome!! I think you just found a side business. Making sharping jigs.

yellowdogsvc · Aug 17, 2012

Very ingenious. the only thing I would add would be some guards for the wheels. Those type of wheels are known to fly apart. I've actually seen a piece embedded in someone's skull.

fishfactor · Aug 17, 2012

yellowdogsvc said:
Very ingenious. the only thing I would add would be some guards for the wheels. Those type of wheels are known to fly apart. I've actually seen a piece embedded in someone's skull.

The non sharpening wheel still has the guards. I had to take them off the sharpening wheel in order to sharpen the entire cutting edge at the same time. A 10" grinder would solve this but they are a lot heavier and a lot more expensive.

Dadof3 · Aug 17, 2012

If you continue to grind with the side of that wheel you run a high risk of catastrophic failure at high RPM's. I'm not a safety cop and I "bend the rules" too, but be careful.

Eric H · Aug 17, 2012

Nice..... I like it and have thought to do the same thing... Wtg.. Ya dont mind if i copy do ya lol

ptgdigger · Aug 17, 2012

Dadof3 said:
If you continue to grind with the side of that wheel you run a high risk of catastrophic failure at high RPM's. I'm not a safety cop and I "bend the rules" too, but be careful.

I was thinking along the same lines, If you decide to continue forward using a bench grinder you may want to see if you can source a surface grinder type wheel for it that has the correct rpm rating and arbor size, surface grinding wheels are designed to grind on the face rather than the edge. And maybe fab up some kind of guard for the back side of the wheel towards the grinder operator to limit the directions that the pieces can fly in a wheel failure.

All in all an excellent creation, that knife looks very sharp, I'm sure there's a noticeable difference in the cutter head performance with sharp knives.

Ray