The cylindrical, plane, or surface grinding machine is the product of comparatively recent years. By many tradesmen it is regarded as a specialised machine for repetition work, or for jobs that are too hard to be machined or filed in the ordinary way.

The grinding machine, however, is essentially a finishing machine for a great variety of work. Its speed and the accuracy with which it functions cannot be denied. It is doubtful if there is a turner or machinist anywhere (no matter how skilled), who, using a lathe or other machine, can finish work as quickly and as accurately thereon as the same work can be done on a grinding machine when correctly handled.

Although a grinding machine is a precision tool, it nevertheless requires less skill to operate (when employed on accurate work) than the lathe, milling machine, or planing machine, etc. As a finishing machine it has dispensed with most of the skill demanded of the old time craftsman (the use of file and emery cloth) for finishing and polishing work to fine dimensions.

If a workshop foreman twenty years ago had requested his best turner to turn a dozen piston (or valve) rods, all to a given size, and, at the same time have stipulated that there must not be more than .0015 of an inch variation in the finished size of the rods so turned, such a turner would have been perplexed and worried as to whether or not a request of the kind could actually be carried out.

In modern workshop practice, however, measurements much finer than the above are quite common.