Sharpening Mower Blades Is EASY!

Rip Torn that's old you tell it cut a few days ago shredded that's what a dle blade does to your grass it's not very healthy for it look at today's cut this is the bottom fresh clean cut perfectly sharp cut right [Music] into so I've been sharpening by hand most of my life and I feel like I can do a really good job however I cannot do that good of a job welcome back to the shop everybody in today's video we're going to be doing a part two to lawnmower blade sharpening so last year I showed how you could use some cheap angle grinders certain types of disc and I showed a couple of ways to sharpen mow blades including using a machine like this right here in that video I had several people request that I buy this right here which I did and this is a new angle finder attachment for an angle grinder you're supposed to clamp your blade and give you the perfect angle and make sharpening a breeze we're going to find that out today let's go over my basic setup and what I've used up to this point so typically in the past I have always used just cheap plugin Grinders this is going to be your most affordable option and by affordable I mean yes you could use hand files and some other methods but I have found this to be the quickest and most affordable option out there today I'm probably going to use my cordless grinder because we're going to be moving this over outside for grinding but you don't have to go with an expensive cordless grinder you can get a cheap plug-in one actually these cheap Porter cables have lasted me for years and years and years I own several of them I'll put a link down in the description to where I pick those up on Amazon last year I introduced to my shop a new plug in you can tell this is a much beefier lawn more blade sharpener right here now as you can expect the cost goes up dramatically to something like this this unit's about $230 and I found that the disc that came with it were not adequate so I want not spend another $50 to $60 on this disc right here it's a really good americanmade 24 grit disc and uh it was a game changer for this for somebody running like a lawn service or multiple pieces of equipment with a large property like us this can make a little more sense for the average homeowner Maybe not maybe you want to save the money now the nice thing about this is it's already got angle guides in there so you can run your blade back and forth it finds that proper angle for you but whenever you're grinding with a grinder like this you're hand grinding and you're kind of guessing at the degrees that's where a lot of people have concerns using this they want to make for sure they get the proper angle which is going to give you the best cut the healthiest grass and put the least amount of wear and tear on your mower that's where this comes in right here this is a guide for any type of angle grinder this is what y'all asked me to pick up last year I've been thinking about it and I just found one this is actually quite robust it's more than I was expecting because I only paid believe it was $41 for this off of Amazon so in this bag that comes with it you're going to see a lot of different studs right here that's what actually amounts to this equipment and I found that this one threads in to my dwalk grinder and it comes with a jam nut right here it also threads into my Porter Cable now should you have different threads well that's why you have different studs in here as well so we're going to set this up on a big block of wood that I have where you can clamp it or bolt it to a table but this allows you to find different degrees you clamp your blade into here and then you'll actually stick this stud into here I'll show you all this in just a second and this is going to Pivot and allow you to guide and sharpen your blade perfectly one of these supposedly that's what they claim at least and then this other piece right here actually bolts right in here and this is what you bolt either to your workbench or to block of wood like we're going to do today so should this and this combo work you can get into a good sharpening setup for way less than 100 bucks and potentially have you a way to do accurate repeatable grinds to the proper degree and uh really blow through sharpening mower [Music] blades all right so let's face it two of the main reasons most people don't sharpen motor blades themselves is because they don't really know how or the concern they're not doing it correctly we're going to try to solve that today or because it's aggravating to get underneath and change the the blades themselves that is not a problem with our grasshopper front mount deck series here I always brag on this grasshopper makes a bunch of different models from gas models to De models to fully loaded models to lower series although they're all professional quality and the cool thing about these front deck series is well all you do is press a button right here press it again and the deck starts coming up the first one of these I seen in a dealership was 20 years ago and I said I would absolutely have one what a genius design to take care of Maintenance because changing your blades and cleaning underneath the deck is one of the most common things you're going to do with a mower now if you've got a different style mower like your traditional ride on top or a zero turn with a deck underneath you're going to have to get creative I used to lift mine with a tractor if you don't have that you can drive one wheel up some ramps and then Jack it up to make sure it's nice and safe for you to get underneath you're going to have to be with how you work on yours maybe you just have a push mower that's much easier you can push down the ground put some weight on one in and you get full access to the blade itself all right so now I get easy access to these blades they're rounded over although they're still relatively sharp but definitely rounded over no sharp edge at all so here's the thing if you can set yourself up a convenient way to change your blades into sharpen them like I'm going to show you today a sharper blade is healthier on the grass because it doesn't tear it it cuts the grass so your yard will look better and the sharper the blade the less drag that it has when it's rounded over like this so the easier it is on your mowers engine bearings everything else sharp blades really do make a difference there's a reason that professionals sharpen their blades every day when they're out there mowing a bunch of yards okay so let's take a good look at these blades and get a good before and after so you can see no sharpened Edge see how rounded over that is right there plus we're starting to get a little dip in it's cuz we've already done sharpen these once before tip is rounded off but yeah you can see there is not a sharp edge there at all very rounded over and here's a look at the other side see it's rounded as well chunks and chips missing out of this so definitely time to sharpen these by the way I should also mention that sharpening more blades my entire life the more often you sharpen them the longer a set of blades will last if you let a blade round over and wear down in so rough and get a rough Edge on it it starts collecting and hitting more dust debris and other materials and it'll wear down even quicker and eventually you reach a point where you got to throw away a very expensive set of blades so the more often you sharpen the healthier it is for the mower the grass and your blades will last longer so I've got an old telephone pole here I use this kind of like a little work toop it's really heavy I am just going to mount our new piece to this and then we'll just do our grinding right here throwing all the material out of the shop all right so this kit came with all Hardware except mounting bolts so I just found a couple lag bolts laying in the shop that should be fine and we're just going to mount this in center of the post I don't know about clearances just yet we can always move it if we need [Music] to all right let's get these bolts in right here all right so there is a knob on the bottom that we can loosen to go to our different degrees let's tighten that in then it looks like we pinch our mower blade right in here with this now the instructions are a little difficult to read and understand so we're going to put this in and kind of get it all figured out right here so as you can see that pinches the blade nicely I'm just going to center it up for now and it looks like we are going to put that stud into here after we mount it into our angle grinder and looks like it's going to get us where we need to be up here let's see if this all matches up and works like they claim so let's talk disc real quick this is very important where a lot of people mess up your traditional grinder is going to come with one of these cheap hard disc right here this is just your hard Pat grinding disc these are fine for taking off metal just basic metal they are not good for mower blades this takes off too much metal and more importantly it overheats your blade doesn't take stuff off evenly as well but overheating or changing The Temper of a blade is a bad thing now you've changed the temper and as you hit things the Blade's going to wear uneven or chip or it's going to cause problems I highly recommend if you're going to do the angle grinder method use what's called a flap disc this is basically sandpaper disc 40 grit works really good I just buy mine at 60 grit those work really really well they don't take too much metal off at a time but they don't overheat your blades it's very rare I see discoloration on a blade running flap disc unless I'm just really gring in there take nice even Strokes per side you can buy these for just a couple bucks at any of your big box stores you know $2 to $5 or I buy them by 10 pack off of Amazon I've had excellent luck with this brand right here benchmarks abrasive they are very very affordable on Amazon and bulk and you can see where the handles Mount you can put handles in different locations on these Grinders sometimes you can put them in the top we're going to mount it on this right hand side and keep our hand on the left to do our sharpening okay you see we got an opening right here in order to slide this rod in so let's do that let's check up here doesn't look like we're quite at the angle I need to be so the factory angles may be off that's okay what you can do you can see how our disc is got a small Gap right there you're going to want to come in at a slight angle like this to sharpen but I can tell this blade right here needs to come in a little more so let's adjust our degrees right here and we're just going to match up with the factory Edge very easy to see looking at it from that end all right so let's loosen underneath and find out what angle works best oh that looks pretty close right there even though we're almost maxed out we are pretty well maxed out so obviously the factory degree settings on this are not accurate but look we can just line up by eye you could use a new blade if you have an old worn out one or this old one still has plenty of a good angle on it to show me right there is where we need to be let's tighten everything up so let's kick this on by the way that's beautiful one pass shows me that we are matched up perfectly on the angle look at that it took even amounts of material all the way across the blade left a tiny bit right here where we're kind of dug in arounded over but that's another good way to check that you've got the proper Factory angle right there so don't necessarily trust these degrees just go ahead and match your pad right up to this I can't believe how much it took going all the way across whenever I sharpen them by hands sometimes you'll work this side that side and you don't quite get the factory degree back correct so let's kick this on again and make several Strokes up looks like this is going to be really really easy to do right here [Music] all right so I made several strokes this we've had a sharp edge here and here for a while but you see how we're dipping in wearing in the blade that's perfectly normal I had to make quite a few Strokes just to bring this rolled over section back perfectly flat and get me an edge we're getting very very close after maybe 10 passes and the other important thing is you see how got no blade discoloration did not change the temper of this metal by using these flap disc okay I would say we're there after 10 passes I can maybe make another pass or two but look at that edge hopefully that's showing up come on camera Focus wow okay so I've been char sharpening by hand most of my life and I feel like I can do a really good job however I cannot do that good of a job ultimately what I'm not able to maintain is a perfectly flat Edge which this allows you to do because again we can't rotate this at all that is awesome so now let's see how easy it is wonder if we could just rotate that down we can cool see how easy it is to flip the blade around and repeat the process just going to put it back dead center feel like I could loosen these bolts just a little to make this a little more pre- range of motion but it's kind of wearing in nicely all right angle looks perfect [Music] all right so once again very nice polish finish right there and keep in mind the majority of your blades cutting is done in this section right here I'm not overly concerned with like say that dip back here but that looks beautiful whereas when using something like that machine that I've been showing you it tends to grind down like this with a 24 grit rough dis so you see rough lines and everything else my gut feeling is a polished Edge like this is going to allow sand and other stuff to pass over it far easier and wear less quickly but that's just a hunch I know it's so hard to sa it man that's got a beautiful Edge and Factory angle on it so I can definitely say this is helping me keep a better angle than I can even do by hand even after sharpening for you know 30 years so all I've got to do is loosen I do feel like I made a few more passes this time on this side so let's check our blade balance just to make for sure I got this handy little blade balance right here basically this just rides on that Peak and the blade itself will find balance assuming it's equal weight on both sides all right let's see what we got going on here give that just a second okay that blade looks very well balanced it's still moving just a little I do have a slight breeze but it's trying to settle out quite well right there that looks good to me when you got a blade that's far to one side or the other say it looked like that and you could tell okay I've obviously got more weight on this side cuz that means I've taken more metal off that side what you would do is make more passes on this side to get things back nice and even this will help protect your bearings and spindles underneath your mower deck because when it gets you know out of whack more weight on the other side you'll get that vibration and that's just going to make the shaft underneath there let me show you the shaft that goes up in here and then you've got bearings and all in there it's just going to wobble around and wear out your spindle itself all right for I think it was $41 that I paid I kind of thought this was going to be a gimmick but it does allow me even me that's been mowing my whole life and sharpening majority of my life to kind of maintain a better angle than I've ever been able to before it's not as gimmicky as I thought it feels really really robust I'm surprised I thought it was going to be cheap material especially for the price um it's working awesome we throw another blade in here sharpen it up [Music] [Music] all right so cutting nice and clean it's going to be almost impossible B to show but again that sharp edge is going to give me a clean cut instead of ripping my grass let's see if we can find something here I had just mowed this section with my rough cut tractor mower so ultimately that's going to kind of tear the grass not good sharp blades not highspeed uh oh right here is a perfect piece all right so take a look at that see how the top is ripped and torn maybe I can get it to focus go over here get something black like this seat all all right you see that RI torn that's old you tell it's cut a few days ago shredded that's what a dull blade does to your grass it's not very healthy for it look at today's cut this is the bottom fresh clean cut perfectly sharp cut right in two this is what a sharp blade will do for you it won't rip and tear you grass and a nice clean cut again is very easy on the engine the mower some people truly believe that you just run a set of blades till they're worn out and you change them that's a bad way of thinking you want a good proper angle clean cut of your grass cuz it benefits so many different things again perfect example right here everything I'm pulling up top you can see where it's dead see how it's just shredded split busted open from the field mower bottom cut today nice clean cut all right y' as you can see we got a lot of mowing to do I'm going to be sharpening blades All Summer Long my mower is going to be happier now I'm going to be happier here I wasn't so sure about that product again this isn't a sponsored video nothing like that bought and paid for my own money straight off of Amazon links in the description that does help support the channel if you decide to buy through that link but I must say that thing actually gives me an excellent angle and repeatable results just what I'm looking for hopefully enjoyed it catch you on the next video

Channel: The Kelley's Country Life

Views: 208,021

Keywords: farming, farm, farmstead, homestead, homesteading, john deere, john deere 4066r, firewood, chainsaw, chainsaws, stihl chainsaws, garden, gardening, country living, stihl, stihl MS170, cutting firewood, sharpening chainsaw, polaris ranger, cutting grass, mowing, wood chipper, pto chipper, woodmaxx, woodmaxx chipper, log splitter, stihl ms260 pro, pto wood chipper, food plots, barndo, barndominium, pole barn house, building a pole barn house, american cls, sharpening mower blades

Id: bTdiq0Ydaz4

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024