Grinding SPARKS 🔥

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:01]What creates these sparks? These sparks are kind of like your chips when you're milling or turning it. They are the pieces of iron that's reacting with the wheel and coming off that material.

[00:00:11]Aluminum doesn't have any iron in it.

[00:00:14]That's what makes it gummy. Instead of blowing sparks off, it tends to gum up and gum your wheel up. Now, silicon carbide is the best wheel to use when you're grinding non-ferrous materials like the ones we did in this video. As you can see, the wheel did not get loaded up compared to an aluminum oxide wheel on a Z24 where we did a skim cut and you can actually see the aluminum bedded into the wheel. Now, not only is that going to not give you a good grind, that's going to cause a catastrophic failure and could cause your wheel to explode on you. Which you don't want to happen.