We just had a demo of the SIP Peerless 7000 reel grinder. What really sets this apart form other grinders is it grinds parallel to the reel rollers. The way that this happens is the table is machined so the surface that the reel sets on while grinding, is parallel to the grinding wheel travel. There is no individual adjustment to each end of the grinder, only up or down along the entire length of the travel.
What’s the benefit of that to a shop? Once you’ve gone through your reels and have ground everything true, regrinding or touchups are quick.. very quick 
and you are assured that your grind is absolutely parallel. Myself and a lot of people grind with other machines and there are ways to assure you have outstanding reels without this setup. It’s just that after trying this it is amazingly easy.
The image to the right here, is of Mark Pilger, CEO of SIP is using their Pii tape to determine the diameter of the reels. The image to the left shows the 
left and right diameters of the reels of the fairway machine we tested this on. The reel is then put on the grinder and adjusted to grind down the large side first and true it up. This is done in spin mode. The motor that spins the reel can be moved from side to side depending on the reel and automatically changes direction depending on which side of the machine it’s plugged into. It has a counter that can be set for the number of passes across the reel and an auto feed for the grind wheel. So once it was set up and spinning, the reel would go back and forth, each time would reduce the amount of passes on the counter and on each pass the auto feed would turn the hand wheel in about 1.5 thousands.
An exceptional feature of the machine is it can also grind in relief. This is done by adding an index device to the grinding head and changing the grinding stone to a thinner model. Rather then having a guide finger to keep the grinding wheel against the reel it relies on a torque clutch on the drive motor. So you set the clutch, and adjust the index guide to the reel blade and adjust the amount of grind you want. We were able to grind all the relief in each blade in one pass around. The indexer made this an automatic deal.
Mark was grinding the 5 reels on one of our Toro 5410 fairway mowers. These have groomers on the front of the reel and rear roller brushes on the rear. That’s about as many options as you can get on one. We had just done our other mower the day before with another grinder and spin only. These we put in a lot of relief. We’re going to see how they differ over a period of time.
We also tried out their bedknife grinder. To be honest, I was pretty skeptical about it, particularly that it had 2 grinding wheels and motors. That was an eyeopener. To start with, the grinders are fixed and the knife carrier travels back and forth on fixed rails. The whole thing is rock solid and smooth. Most bedknife grinders rely on their simplicity to switch between grinding the top and front face.. This seems to set a new bar because you don’t have to move anything.
The bedknife itself sits on a machined bar and a point (ball bearing) with two in/out adjustments and 2 clamps. Really simple and once adjusted works for all knives in that series. The grinding adjustment is super easy for both the top and front. The angles are selected for each face by inserting a pin in the appropriate hole. They have a special stone to handle the tool steel insert knives we use and a micro mist coolant system to keep the grinding temp down. Like I said, it was an eyeopener to use and incredibly fast..
If you’re looking for a grinder I think you owe it to yourself to try this out. Checkout more of their products at The SIP Website.
