Grinding is one of the most important operations employed in production engineering to remove unwanted material and to introduce desired geometry and surface properties. Once considered only a secondary finishing operation, grinding is now more widely employed as suggested by the term, "abrasive machining." The approach to grinding taken here is to consider the basic processes in fundamental terms rather than to attempt to present a large mass of empirical results. Thus, the emphasis is placed on why things occur as they do rather than on specific solutions to problems ordinarily met. The rationale for this approach is that it better enables an engineer in the workshop to find solutions to new and unusual problems.