Sharp lawn mower blades are important for a good-looking lawn. It is advised that at least once a year the lawnmower blades should be sharpened. If the blades are not sharpened, they become dull. Mowing with a dull blade can create an uneven cut.
And that can make the grass turn brown in colour and make your lawn easily affected by diseases. Sharp blades, on the other hand, gives your lawn the perfect cut quickly. And make the lawn neatly cut and healthier.
There are few different ways to sharpen lawn mower blades. The mower blades sharpening can be done either by hand with files or can be sharpened by using chisels and punches, or with a machine like a bench grinder. On average, a mower blade should be sharpened after every 20 to 25 hours of use time.
According to the design of the mower, you might able to sharpen the blade, which will save a significant amount of your time. The sharpening of the blades can be done as follows:
Steps to sharpen mower blades
The following steps are used to sharpen the mower blades completely for anybody without having any experience.
1.Disconnect the spark plug:
To ensure your safety, you can disconnect the spark plug. So that there is no chance that the mower can start while you’re working. This will eliminate any chance of the engine that accidentally occurs when you start up working on the mower.
If you’re unsure where the spark plug is, it’s very easy to identify as a thick rubber cap attached to a white or light-colored ceramic post. You can simply twist the top cap off, and it’s disconnected.
2.Tip the mower on its side:
To access the blades, tip the mower over on one side to discover the retaining nut or bolt that secures the blade to the underside of the mower. Attaching a short wood block between the end of the blade and the inner surface of the mowing deck helps to keep the blade from spinning.
Turn the mower onto its side with the air filter and carburetor side up. The carburetor can be easily identified because it contains throttle cables running to it.
3.Sharpen the Blade With a File:
Sharpen the blade with a hand file. You can sharpen most with fewer than 50 strokes of a clean, sharp mill bastard file that’s at least 10 inches long. You should focus to sharpen the blade at an angle of 45-degree that strokes should go from the inner edge to the outer.
If you have a bench grinder available to you, then use it to grind just enough to establish a new edge. With a bench grinder, this should only take two or three passes for each cutting edge which saves more time. If you don’t have a bench grinder, a quality file cutter will do the same job but takes more time.
4.Balance the blade:
Mowers can run quickly and easily when the blades are perfectly balanced. Sometimes, over-sharpening will remove excess metal from one side, resulting in the blade not being balanced. The mower blades are balanced to keep weight spread evenly when the engine is turning on.
To check the blades are balanced or not, you simply hang the blade on a nail or other fixed point, and see if it falls to one side or the other. If one side becomes harder than the other side, it means that the blade is not perfectly balanced.
If you wanted to balance it, sharpen the heavier side and remove some metal and then retest it. An unbalanced blade will probably spoil the blade shafts or bearings and also causes heavy sounds.
5.Reinstall the Blade:
Tightening the blade is very important because a loose blade ruins the engine timing and sometimes makes the mower difficult to start operating. Reattach your spark plug wire and your power source and take the newly sharpened lawnmower out to check the run operation.
6.Maintain Your Mower Blade:
At least once or twice during the mowing season of your lawn, you can use lawnmower blades. Which keeps the mower in good working condition and also helps in maintaining an effective and proper lawn.
For example, if you have a yard that consumes 30 minutes time to complete the mowing operation and you usually mow it twice a week, then your blade will reach a time limit of just 20 weeks may be available for only 40 cutting sessions. According, to this you will sharpen your blades roughly two to three times per year.
It may be a good thing to maintain an extra mower blade on hand. In which way you can easily swap a fresh blade whenever you need to sharpen it.