Clipper Blade Sharpening Class: How to Deal with Poorly Sharpened Clipper Blades

all right well i have been in the midst of a battle today with a group of blades that i've been working on um occasionally we run into blades that just want to give a fit in this particular case they're giving a fit because well they weren't sharpened properly and that does happen out in the field from time to time now it's odd because the gentleman that i'm actually sharpening behind normally does a good job so i'm not sure what happened that particular day but these blades are in some pretty interesting shapes so i just want to kind of show you what i'm running up against so give me just a second i'm going to pull a blade out here and kind of show you all right so the main issue that i'm running into with some of these blades is you can actually see how the inside surface when it was cut originally was severely over rounded around the tips and and what you're not seeing here on this video too is actually how this cutter started out it literally was almost an oval in the middle when i checked the previous grind pattern on this blade to give you an example of this this is the the cutter side of the of the blade and you can actually uh see that oval that i was talking about that has to be overcome which isn't a big deal you can sharpen this out fortunately there is enough life on this blade to be able to make this work and then the blade have a little bit more life to it after the fact but a good bit of work is actually going to have to be done to this blade so what i wanted to touch base on was just kind of showing what i'm going to do in order to be able to keep heat down and then do the work within a reasonable amount of time but this blade quite frankly is going to take a little bit longer to repair than others regardless of what i do all right so i'm going to start the process of doing the sharpening on this blade and um in this particular case probably using a 180 grit on these blades would would cut these in a lot faster now i only use 240 grit when i do sharpening there's a lot that use 220. um i use 240 because i like the way that the blades cut after the fact it does help to burnish them in just a little bit as well but 180 would actually be in this particular case a little bit better uh of a grit to use because it would actually cut that down unfortunately i don't have that so since i'm on the band that's going to take me a little bit longer to do the work what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go ahead and start up my wheel after i charge it so i'm going to show you how i charge my wheel on my cs 201 16 inch plate machine all right when i charge the plate i just go through some simple steps the first step that i go through is i actually clean with h42 i'm going to do a couple of sprays over the top of the plate i take a full size sheet of paper towel and i clean my plate there's numerous ways to charge these plates this plate this way has just always worked well for me as i spin around you can see the plate just naturally spins with the spinning of my hand on the plate as i clean it you can see the material that i got off of the plate i'm going to just flip this over and then just continue to clean until i dry this off just a little bit get most of that grit that was on the plate off of there i'm going to then flip the towel around and i'm going to take a mixture 50 50 of h42 and lard oil and i'm going to do about a silver dollar sized puddle that i spray on the plate and then just going to spread that right around the plate same way as how i cleaned and i'm just going to lightly wipe over the top you want to have just a little bit of grease you can actually see let me draw on the plate where you're going to be able to put some grit on and the grit will hold on the plate this lard oil and h42 and straight lard oil works just fine too as a medium to hold the grit on the plate always make sure you're reasonably liberal with your grit that you use on the plate mainly because you want to make sure that you are not getting past the grit onto the plate and then smoothing the plate out and warping the plate uh you won't get a good cut on your blades if your plate is not in good condition so i just used a three inch paint brush to go ahead and spread that around the plate and now i'm just doing a quick charge with a wooden charging block this is just some pine that i use to spread that around i'm gonna start my machine up now this is gonna start off slow and it will pick up speed as we go the nice thing about these units is is they are easy start so they can be started quite simply on a um inverter without a problem i'm using a 2500 watt inverter on this but um you can use a 1500 watt inverter you can go as low as a thousand watt but remember that i'm running a light on this so there is a light up here that i'm actually running as well um and then i also run my demagnetizer on this and other things so just keep in mind i also run a vacuum a lot of times when i'm doing this as well i'm just not going to run it during the video because it would be too loud so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to start and you can see my spark pattern kicking off and i'm going to stay straight on the plate sorry i was doing a little bit of that cut you saw me go a little crooked but i was looking at my camera instead of looking what i was doing i wanted to make sure i was catching that and what i'm doing now is i'm just going to check the blade to make sure that i'm getting a decent pattern on here and cutting enough up the teeth in order to be able to get a clean cut back and forth across the blade now in this particular blade probably what i'm going to end up doing since you've seen that i've already started to do some sharpening on it based on what you saw on this before we started i'm not probably going to take on the comb uh the grind line on the inside all the way up to the very tips of the teeth i'll probably get close and then i'll go ahead and i will settle when i do the setback on this i'll settle the cutter back just a little bit um so that there's enough throw back and forth but i don't want to go ahead and continue to sharpen on this blade over and over again when there's no reason to continue to do that on the comb when you do your setback on the blade you can drop your cutter back behind the problem area and the blade will cut fine on the cutter though we don't have that choice so if you have an improperly cut cutter on a clipper blade you're going to have to correct that problem and i'll see if i can put up a picture of another one that i ran into earlier that had issues on the outside teeth that i didn't get with the first sharpening i'm going to go back and forth now until i can clean this blade all the way up now what i want to be careful that i don't do is i don't want to overheat the blade so i don't happen to have this on here and that's making me rethink um what i'm doing i probably need to have a piece of ceramic tile or something that i can use to cool a blade down a little bit quicker because this one could stand to be cooled down so what i'm going to do is i just ran this one i'm going to cool it down on my palm so when i say it's hot i mean it's not burning hot but you don't want to overheat any of these blades because you can warp them so i'm going to go ahead and put this back on again take a look at my work [Music] and you can see let me swing this over here to the magnifier then i'm starting to get a little bit closer but you can see there's still a whole lot of work that needs to be done on this blade so what i would do in this particular case is i would continue to cut and continue to cut and continue to cut on this this cutter until i got all the way past all the damage that's on the teeth the issue is is there's so much damage on these last three blades that i'm doing that it's probably going to be better for me to go ahead and just pull three new cutters and put new cutter blades on these blades so that's i think the course that i'm gonna take in order to be able to correct this okay you could hear the machine or i don't know if you noticed this or not but on the machine you could actually hear it going making a sound kind of like that to just slow the machine down there's a break on this machine that stops the machine after you're doing your work that's another feature of this machine that i like so i'm going to go back in i'm going to clean the plate and i'm going to do the other two combs for these other two blades and get them within reason and then i'm just gonna go ahead and replace the cutters on the other two all right i've recharged my plate so i'm gonna go ahead and start this back up the reason that i recharged my plate after only one blade is because i did a lot of work on that cutter and also again i'm using 240 grit so i want to make sure that i have a freshly gritted wheel and i also want to make sure that i don't get all the way down to the plate through the grit and create any problems myself in the future with this plate i have several blades on this plate now and while i was at the sharpeners jam this past weekend i double checked this plate with jason from the edge pro who manufactures the nebraska blades machines now and he we confirm that the this blade is still cutting well um you can see here that i've put the magnet at the root of the teeth not the root of the flutes but at the root of the teeth and then i'm going to go ahead and do the sharpening on this blade you can see the quality of my spark pattern all right that one sharpened up pretty well [Applause] i'm going to take another quick look at this cutter just to make sure that i need to replace this one i didn't do as much work on this particular blade oh yeah no so you can see right here um on the cutter let's see if we can get this to come in just here in the light without going to the magnifier that there's still a lot of damage on the tips of that cutter so i'm just going to switch that out the customer is going to be a lot better off once i do that so i'm just going to go ahead and do that and not try and fight that process i know that i can savor a little bit of money but it's not always saving money by doing a blade to the point where you're overheating it because in the long run it's not going to cut as well and quite frankly that's going to reflect poorly on you as a sharpener as well all right so just to kind of show you what i've got here on this blade drop this down [Applause] so you can see [Applause] the tips are still rounded out but i've got a lot of surface to actually play with here in order to be able to get this the cutter on this blade um so i'm going to when i do the setback on this i'm going to make sure that it's back behind that because every other part of this comb is cut properly it's just not cut properly all the way out to the tips so as long as that setback is set back behind where the problem is it'll be okay so and then finally what i'm going to do is i'm going to sharpen the cutters as well um the cutters that i use are from one of our sponsors of the channel uh groomer's best friend matthew yo and um i use his aftermarket cutters on my blades they work very well but i always like to just put my edge on everything that i'm gonna put into anybody's hands so i'm just double checking the cut that i got on my cutter here just make sure that we get this touched up nicely come up off of the plate all right i'm going there gonna do this one and then one more we're gonna be ready to look at assembling these blades all right i'm going to go ahead and de-magnetize my blades [Music] all right now that my blades have been demagnetized i always like to take the parts that i'm going to be mating together with the blade and do a little adjustment these tools are made by hamaguri usa which is another sponsor of our channel and i'm just adding a little bit of tension to the springs now i always add just a smidge attention to the springs because again we've taken a little bit off of the blade and i want to add some tension now because it's much easier to take tension off of a blade than add tension after the fact this is a tool that dennis makes with hamaguri usa to be able to easily add tension he has another tool here for setting your sockets so i'm going to go in and i'm going to set each of the sockets and make sure they're squeezed in properly those didn't move so they were set properly to begin with by the other sharpener which is good all right so we'll start the blade assembly all right i'm going to start the process of doing blade assembly by doing some cleaning on the blade so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to down actually below the camera i'm going to run a brush through the blade because i show a lot of people this that don't want to have a vac system and don't want to have like a compressed air system on their van i use this to clean the blades out and deburr them by pulling the burrs forward as a step so i'm going to go through the blade i'm going to come around the front and i'm going to pull the burrs off of the front of the blade now it's not going to hurt the blade because the blade is actually much harder than this bristle brush is which is just a scrubbing brush that you can pick up at most any store like maybe an ollie's or uh dollar general or someplace like that again through the teeth i'm going to come back around and i'm going to go ahead and work the other side of the blade and i'm going to do all three of these blades that way all right so now that we've cleaned through that blade i'm gonna go ahead and wipe the comb down wipe the cutter down i wipe any of the mating surfaces and i'm doing blades this way and then we'll start the assembly process okay to assemble the blades is quite simple we're just going to go ahead and lay them out we're going to take a little bit of oil we'll put some oil across the teeth and the back rail two drops and then a drop on the cutter for the blade guide once i have all that together i'm going to go ahead and set my spring on top of the blade but you can actually see how it's wiggling you see how it's wiggling like that but what happens a lot of times like i just fell off too is if you look at this blade you can actually see that it's crooked so what i like to do is i like to straighten that spring before i go ahead and put that back on let's put that blade guide back on there we'll put our socket back in so the socket will go up and in like this move over and then pull back that's why you're not fighting with that socket and you can see it still is off a little bit so let's go ahead and take a look and see if it had some memory and move back yep just a little straighten that a little bit better there we go and again same thing put the socket back on the guy keeps wanting to make a run for it that over our piece and now we're much better than we were so we're going to flip this over we're going to align our holes so there's a slotted hole in the spring and then there's a hole that you can kind of see moving around that's threaded that's in the socket and you need to align the two holes in order to be able to get the screw started and of course whenever you're doing anything for a video all right so we got those holes aligned and we get that started you can actually see where that made it together properly and do the same thing for the second screw all right so i'm going to push this back and get prepared to do my setback all right so i'm on my magnet my magnafire again and i want to show you the setback that i'm going to do on the blade here let's pull that off and see if we can there we go that'll be a little bit better without that light with some natural light coming through the window you can see what i'm doing with the setback on this blade i want to make sure that when i do this i want the tips of my cutter to be underneath that damage that's on that blade so you can see that damage is still there you can see the tips of the cutter are going to be back from that you can actually see a lot of times the setback a little bit better if you hold the blade this way and look down the blade as opposed trying to look across it i'm going to get that set up properly and then we're going to go ahead and tighten that up so i'm just going to palm this and i'm going to go in and i'm going to just do a snug and snug and i'm going to tighten it and i'm going to tighten it and that way if that cutter moved forward at all it didn't move forward a lot so what i want to do now is i want to make sure that i'm back behind where my problem is and i can see that fairly well although having that cutter on there along with that there's an awful lot of oh there we go we can see that you can see we're actually behind where the damaged tips are and there's plenty of room for that cutter to move back and forth without making any contact and all the rest of the blade is actually functionally is just fine so as i sharpen this blade over time that's going to get better and better i just don't want to take additional life off of the blade if i don't need to all right let's go ahead and do a quick test on this one all right so you get to see the missile floor here [Music] go ahead and start that blade up and we're going to do it i want to go ahead and use my oath to test ring and just slide it right through and it should be a nice clean cut without any grab or pull and actually see how it just kind of just pops right off of there what you don't want to do is you don't want to stretch the string over and then do a cut like this that's cheating what you want to do is you want to take the string you want to just settle it right through the blade and you want the cutter and the blade to cut on its own without fraying on this ring so this blade is good it's ready to go back to the customer the other thing that i like to do as well is i like to test the cutter as far as how much pressure it's taking to move the cutter so this right here you can actually see this is a go no go this is a blade scale that's also made by huma guri usa which is dennis's company it's a great scale because it shows what the poundage and pressure is so you can see here that on the average anywhere from two and a half to about three and a half pounds is just right in the sweet spot between two and three quarters and three and a quarter is about where i like to be if i can do it i never want to be beyond the yellow when i'm pressing onto the um cutter and i don't want to be before it as well because that'll make it too weak just make sure and normally just for the video i'm showing this way i usually have this down on a solid surface and i put my blade drive on top make sure you're holding your socket when you do this as well don't put your thumb on the spring like this because it'll change the tension and i'm just going to go ahead and press down again and you can actually see at about that sweet spot maybe up a little bit towards the upper part of the yellow right there as it just starts into the yellow is where it moves so this is about three and a quarter pounds if i actually remove just a little bit of tension and the way you would do that is just reduce the spring tension by pulling up on this the spring we'll put this in here we'll take this blade scale we'll press that down and you can see it moves more right in that sweet spot now i don't want to remove too much of the tension because the blade is cutting fine okay so this actually is ready to go back to the customer and thank you again to our two sponsors groomer's best friend which is matthew yo out in washington state i get uh my cutters from him i get my ceramic cutters from him they're both after market and they've always worked well for me i do a five-speed cord from him and i get dremel tools from him too with a specialty dremel that he's created for the grooming industry for the tools that we just used too in this video that dennis makes for doing the adjustments on the springs and the sockets and then also the blade scale from hamager usa we're thankful for them and for everything that they do dennis also sells a line of flat home machines i sell those flat home machines i also sell the clipper blade sharpener that you saw me using here the nebraska blades machine so if you're ever interested in any of those units you could give me a ring and i would send you a quote and also on this video if we get at least 50 likes and if we get uh and anybody that puts a comment on here i'm gonna go through if we get to 50 likes and then there's comments that's actually on there i'm going to run through all of the comments so if you want to win these you're going to have to go on the comment section just make a comment on the video and i will send these two tools for you for free if you comment on this video say something nice about the video if you've trained with me say something nice or quite frankly say something mean if you want that's perfectly fine too but go ahead and jump on there and i will go through the comments on this and we will find a winner for those two tools in the future but thanks for watching this customer is going to be happy with this blade now i just hate that i ended up having to replace a cutter on it but that's going to happen when you're out in the field and this is actually better for the customer in the long run so i hope this helped if you ever have any questions don't hesitate to reach out to me the information for our two sponsors will be below on in the video in the little drop down menu that you can pull down and you can see the links to the websites for these two guys so thank you very much to them and look forward to seeing you all soon and until then well stay sharp

Channel: JimSharpBlog

Views: 71,917

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Id: B4rIPEwkTWs

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Mon May 23 2022