I posted yesterday about getting a cheap cordless clipper to make outdoor haircuts more convenient than what I experience using my corded Oster Fast Feed. The Oster also needs some maintenance since it's about 20 years old and no longer cuts as well it used to. I got some excellent advice (as usual here) on the superior performance of the tool I've got over a cheap set of consumer grade battery powered clippers, so I'm now thinking up continuing to live with the slight inconvenience of dealing with extension cords and bringing the tool back to peak performance.
Has anyone here sharpened their own clipper blades? There are plenty of tutorials out there, but I'd love to hear what kind of results folks here have experienced. I tried once long ago on a pair of cheap clippers, using wet and dry sandpaper on a glass backing. I don't recall the progression I used, but I think I may have started at 400 or 800 taken it to 1200 or 1500 on 3M W/D paper. I'm sure I didn't do anything to deburr along the way, and since I was a newb sharpener back then, I probably wasn't evaluating my progress effectively. But I didn't get the results I was hoping for. The cheap blades remained dull, and as a result I went out and bought the Oster which has served me well.
I've since acquired lots of stones for knives and razors, and while no expert, I'm now reasonably competent at general sharpening. So I'd like to put my tools and experience to work for this new honing challenge. Some specific questions:
Has anyone here sharpened their own clipper blades? There are plenty of tutorials out there, but I'd love to hear what kind of results folks here have experienced. I tried once long ago on a pair of cheap clippers, using wet and dry sandpaper on a glass backing. I don't recall the progression I used, but I think I may have started at 400 or 800 taken it to 1200 or 1500 on 3M W/D paper. I'm sure I didn't do anything to deburr along the way, and since I was a newb sharpener back then, I probably wasn't evaluating my progress effectively. But I didn't get the results I was hoping for. The cheap blades remained dull, and as a result I went out and bought the Oster which has served me well.
I've since acquired lots of stones for knives and razors, and while no expert, I'm now reasonably competent at general sharpening. So I'd like to put my tools and experience to work for this new honing challenge. Some specific questions:
- What stone progression should I use? One YouTube tutorial says to stop at 1000 grit, since if you go finer there will be more metal to metal contact between the two surfaces resulting in too much heat.
- Is there a need to deburr? If so, how? I saw someone using a wire brush to get in between the blade teeth. That looked pretty aggressive to me, but I don't have any better ideas.
- I'll use the Sharpie method to evaluate progress on each stone, but any other ideas on knowing when I'm done?
- Finally, any specific expert tutorials that you can endorse as illustrating best practices?
