Hi Houndogforever:
I'm a big fan of modifying magnetic parallels for this kind of work.
If the surfaces need to be non parallel, you can just put that shape into the parallel as many times as you can get parts into the length of the parallel and line up as many parallels along the mag chuck as you have length for.
Yeah, you have to buy and mod the parallels, but you only need to do it once.
One of the big advantages of doing it this way is that you can do a conventional dress and a conventional grind with the corner of the wheel as if you were grinding plates.
If you have an overhead dresser you can dress the wheel easily and for D-2 I've always really liked that capability.
Mag parallels are pretty cheap, and you can cover the whole mag chuck with them if you want to.
Put a rail or pair of stop pins at the head end of each block so the wheel can't push it off the proper location and you're good to go.
Moving on to the grinder.
I used to have 10 x 20 Kent.
Now I have a 6 x 18 Jones and Shipman.
In my opinion neither is hunky enough to really do production grinding on D-2 blocks, even though both grinders will do just fine for limited runs.
You need something with more balls...5 ponies or more on the spindle and a 12" wheel if production surface grinding of D-2 is your goal.
I've had decent success with the blue seeded gel wheels from Norton.
I buy 46J wheels.
I do as Stephen Thomas recommends; try to take almost all of your grinding allowance in one deep cut but with a very small crossfeed so the corner of the wheel doesn't wear into a wide contact band but remains confined to the corner of the wheel.
It will eventually wear all the way across the wheel face but never into that wide band that is the kiss of death for grinding D-2.
This is how we used to dress chipped punch dies...if we ground them conventionally, we'd never get there.
We'd be fighting burns and suck marks and huge wheel pressures with flung parts forever.
This strategy allowed us to take 30-40 thou in one pass and just set up the grinder and let her go while we went off and did something else.
Our crossfeed was typically between 0.0005" and 0.001" so it still took a long time but nobody cared.
So yeah, a nice stout hydraulic grinder, a set of modified mag blocks, a coarse seeded gel wheel, lots of coolant and a deep DOC with small WOC and you should be good to make bazillions of these efficiently and painlessly.
Doing them on a Blanchard as hobbyshop prefers is another good way but you need access to the Blanchard and I doubt there's all that many around that are small enough to want to have in a reasonably sized shop.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com