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If I was cutting a pasture I wouldn't be too concerned about the finished look. If I was cutting heavily watered & fertilized lawns in upscale subdivisions, I would.

That's true, but when you cut with dull blades the grass gets torn instead of getting cut cleanly, and it's more open to disease and browning.

If you're doing that many blades then a dedicated sharpener should at least be a consideration. At the very least, I'd see if you could adapt a Magna-Matic grinding wheel to work on your bench grinder (their wheels have a 1-1/4" arbor hole). All grinding wheels feel hard if you bang your...

How many blades are you servicing each year? If it's under 20 then why even bother? Just sell them a new blade and show them their junk blade when they come to pick up the mower. If it's over 100 then buy a Magna-Matic sharpener and balancer. It sharpens all blade types including wavy edge...

Magna-Matic 8200 series and the discontinued 8000 series. Works well and really easy to use.

I'm not knocking the Oregon/Burr-King, because I've seen what it can do, but it looks like a grinder that was made to work as a blade sharpener vs. being designed as a sharpener. How messy is it? I've never seen video of one where the debris is contained; it looks like it just kind of goes...

I've sharpened over 1000 blades with a Magna-Matic sharpener and have never had one of the grinding wheels even remotely glaze. If you're using a bench grinder, its wheel is much harder and is much more likely to glaze. I can sharpen over 200 blades with one of their 1" wide 'soft' wheels before...

Mowing the lawn is a chore to most people; so is mower maintenance. The thought of an oil change, scraping the deck, and the "health" of a mower blade is the last thing such a person thinks about. To those of you who own shops.... how many blades are you sharpening each year? If it's several...

To the OP, if you're already planning on mulching wet grass that should have been mowed several days earlier, then lawn care sounds like it's going to be a chore for you. Get a Honda. They have composite decks that won't rust from having wet grass packed into them from not being scraped...

https://www.allamericansharpener.com/blade-balancer

I tell people who watch me balance their blades that goal isn't to have the blade be 100% motionless when it's on the balancer, just to move very slowly.

What's the problem? It was a great analogy.

It's not about the blade, it's about the spindle it's attached to.

That's true, but very rarely on my own lawn. There aren't any stones in the yard, and if I hit a stick it's almost always smaller than the diameter of a pencil so it just gets obliterated (it's also dry and dead, from the tree that's slowly dying. I pick up a few larger sticks once a week)...

If you hit something why would you keep using the blade without either fixing or replacing it?

They make inserts for blade holes that aren't round

I've never seen a new blade that was balanced. Maybe it'd be if it was hung from a nail, but not on my balancer.

The Oregon version is a clone too. The Magna-Matic is the original.

It works, but it doesn't work well. A nail is equivalent to a calculator that shows whole numbers only.

Then how would you know if it was ever out of balance?

I'm in the NW Ohio / SE Michigan area. I've had people of all ages bring me their blades, and people of all ages bring me their mowers, so there's no pattern I can discern. For $5 more I offer to remove and reinstall the blade, but the overwhelming majority of people just bring their blades...

There's no question that there's a lot of "perceived" value/quality in all lines of business. As I mentioned in my last post... car dealers offering free car washes. There are people who fixate on that and insist on going to that dealer for a repair vs. saving $hundreds$ at a private mechanic...

I think it's kind of pointless comparing someone who's doing full service on mowers to someone only sharpening blades. Someone having their mower serviced, including having the blade sharpened, has never even seen or held their blade before, and having it sharpened is just part of the complete...

I don't have an official business that sharpens mower blades, but I advertise that I do it and have had quite a few customers, although not enough to have anywhere near a constant flow of work. In my experience the blades that need the most cleaning are the ones that have come from homeowner...

I think we all know that the end of the blade does the majority of the cutting, but I'm curious as to how blade manufacturers decide what length to make the edge when the blade is made? I've read advertising BS regarding an "extended cutting length" on a blade that had an edge all the way to...

Yep. I've seen pics of decks with no rust, but had areas where the sand had worn them so thin you could see holes forming.

If you live in an area where the soil is sandy then to me that's a whole 'nother animal. Over the years I've seen pics of the effects sand has on blades and it's just crazy the way the metal gets eaten away. If that's your situation then I would just sharpen regularly and then recycle them...

The goal when using a Magna-Matic balancer isn't to get the blade to be motionless, it's only to get it to move very slowly. If you get motionless then that's just a bonus. Their balancer is the equivalent of a calculator that goes out 100 decimal places, whereas a nail is like a calculator...

They didn't have the articulating hedge trimmers in stock so I bought the 131, the edger, and got the trimmer attachment free. Oh, and a 6-pack of their oil. You do that and they double the warranty.

No, you're not reading it wrong. It also depends on when you buy, Right now Stihl is running a promotion on the Kombi system. If you buy a power unit & one attachment, you get a free trimmer attachment. I need some articulating hedge trimmers, so I'll likely buy those & the KM-131 and get...

You mean instead of the Kombi system with the split shaft, just get a trimmer and then change out what's on the end of the shaft? Gearbox attachments is I believe what they call them. I considered that, but the savings isn't significant, switching to different attachments takes longer, and...

Is that a misprint? That doesn't sound right...

I guess not? :unsure:

I don't know where they came from, but I have a bunch of edger blades with small center holes. I haven't measured them, but I know they're smaller than the 1" hole stick edgers use. It'd be nice to be able to use them, so naturally I started wondering if there was some sort of shim or adapter...