What is the difference between a flat grinding machine and a flat polishing machine?
Polishing and lapping are the same type of mechanical motion with the same principle. However, in terms of surface quality, the luster of polished surfaces is higher than that of lapped surfaces. In fact, polishing fluid can be considered a follow-up process to lapping and can be completed simultaneously on the same flat polishing machine. Lapping is divided into coarse lapping and fine lapping, while polishing is further categorized into coarse polishing and fine polishing. Often, we process the surface quality of products through three stages: coarse lapping, fine lapping, and fine polishing. With these three processes, the flatness, parallelism, and roughness of the workpiece surface are quite high. For some customers with less stringent precision requirements, especially those with lower roughness requirements, only the first two stages or just the fine lapping stage are used. The specifics depend on the quality of the workpiece surface and the required quality as requested by the customer.
Grinding and polishing can be performed on the same flat polishing machine, but the configurations differ. Grinding requires a grinding disc and grinding fluid, while polishing uses polishing fluid, a polishing disc, a polishing pad, polishing cloth, and a polishing wheel, among others. When both grinding and polishing are done on a single flat polishing machine, a change of the grinding disc and fluid configuration is required after the grinding process.
