I hope this doesn’t turn into a series, but I’ve titled it that way just in case.
I turned on my new low-budget Skil bench grinder…
Can you believe they expected two tape donuts to keep the two halves of this wheel together?! Dumb.
The labels just label the stone. Generally when they break like that it’s because the stone was either dropped, or whacked with something heavy. You also occasionally see them explode because someone was grinding soft metal like aluminum or copper on them, which fuses to the stone and causes it to go out of balance.
It broke shorty after I turned it on. One of the metal brackets was loose enough that it fell into the stone and got wedged between the stone and upper shield. It was something of a spark-filled emotional event, so I’m not fully certain what happened.
I ordered a replacement stone and bushings so the replacement stone is sitting on a ss bushing rather than the nylon bushing the stone comes with.
As a side note, I’ve heavily used an angle grinder and picked this up because I thought it might be better to move a light piece of metal against a stationary grinder rather than putting the small item in a vice and going at it with a heavy hand-held grinder.
Actually, it took only one flying bolt-bullet to convince me this might be a good idea.
You definitely have to baby the bench stones. The stones are so hard that they are really quite brittle. Still, I don’t think this is your fault. This seems like something the vendor or manufacturer should replace for you.