The high wear resistance of superabrasive grits provides challenges to dressing procedures. CBN grinding wheels are commonly dressed with rotating diamond tools because of the lower toughness and hardness of CBN compared to diamond [MARI07]. However, the dressing forces for CBN are higher than for conventional wheels, which needs to be considered for the dressing system design [JACK11, LINK14a]. Superabrasive wheels are dressed with much smaller depth of cut than conventional wheels [WEGE11].
Diamond grinding wheels are dressed with diamond dressing tools only in limited cases. More commonly, they vitrified bonded silicon carbide rollers are used on brake-controlled truing devices or on driven truing spindles [WEGE11, LINK14a]. The expendable and much cheaper silicon carbide wheel grinds away the diamond tool [MALK08].
Resin or metal bonded superabrasive tools sometimes require a subsequent sharpening process after the profiling process to generate sufficient grain protrusion [WEGE11]. The bonding can be set back for example with a block sharpening process [LINK14a]. Electrolytic in-process dressing (ELID) is an established method for metal bonded diamond wheels [ROWE09]. More dressing procedures using electro chemical and electro physical mechanisms exist for metal bonds [WEGE11].