Sharpen Riding Lawn Mower Blades.

Sharpen Riding Lawn Mower Blades.
Hello I'm Paul Popplewell with Central Equipment Company, I've been employed with them for 18 years. And I'm here today to represent Expert Village. In this segment we're going to be discussing sharpening your blades. By sharpening I mean sharpen and balance your blade. The first step is verify that they're worth sharpening. One way to do that is to stack the blades and look at the gap and make sure that both sides look the same. In this case we have a blade that is bent, and we can stack it in here to show you the difference. See the gap between this blade and this blade is a lot larger than these two. Where this side is flat. In that case we would want to discard that blade and replace it with a new blade. On this blade, it's a mulching blade the edge is not straight all the way across so we will clamp this into a vice and use a hand grinder. Before doing that we need to put on a pair of safety goggles and ear plugs. While sharpening the blade, you want to try to hold true to the manufacturer?s angle. And then after sharpening the one side we'll turn it around and sharpen the other. You do not want to remove anything from the bottom other than to touch it up after you've sharpened the blade. You want to take if off from the top. After you've sharpened both sides you can turn the blade over and just clean that back edge up. And then we have a sharp blade. The last step you want to do is put this on some kind of balancer whether that would be a nail hanging on the wall that you could balance it with. Or more expensive manufacture balancer doesn't matter. But you don't want a blade to be real heavy on one side and light on the other.