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Older Graet States manual push mower. How to sharpen the blades?

Which are you referring to: a reel or a straight blade type? Here I have seen a Great Stated reel mower.

It's the reel type.
Mark Thanks for the links.

Welcome to the forum.

As you know, the reel mower has a stationary blade and multiple (4 or 5) rotating reel blades.

This link has a decent sharpening process.

A reel type mower is sharpened by first ensuring the reel to stationary gap is correctly adjusted on both ends.

At each end there are one or two adjustments to ensure the stationary blade gap is correct.

The mower drive is disassembled to permit attachment of a manual drive crank handle.

Lapping compound is applied to each rotating reel blade. The reel is manually rotated until each blade has a nice uniform surface finish. The mower is then reassembled for normal usage.

There are 2 kinds of blades on a reel mower. The expensive type like golf courses use which have bevel ground blades and the cheap homeowner type which has barrel ground blades. The actual sharpening of either type takes specialized machines and you remove the reel for both. Bevel ground reels can be what is called backlapped. Lapping compound is applied to the blades and then rotated backwards against the bed knife. Barrel ground reels do not respond to backlapping. There are tools with flat stones that can be slid back and forth on the reel blades to try and sharpen them but that does not restore the true barrel grind. Many cheap reel mowers have non adjustable blades so any uneven grinding ruins the reel. There are some commercial barrel ground reel mowers that can be backlapped. There is a reason rotary mowers replaced reel mowers. Homeowners won't spend many hours lapping reels and adjusting blades and bed knives with a feeler guage.

And there is a reason why they called the manual reels man makers. They are not for the lazy person. I had one here that a customer just want it so he could teach his son a lesson about complaining about the self propelled walk behind mower. His son quit complaining the very first week. <LOL>

My Fiskars18" Stay Sharp reel mower has blades are designed to remain sharp for the life of the mower.

If sharpening is ever required, the manufacturer specifies usage of lapping compound and a manual crank handle.

Hammermechanicman said:

There are 2 kinds of blades on a reel mower.

Click to expand...

Here is the link to the professional mower maintenance document with the image snippet from Hammermechanicman.

wingless said:

Welcome to the forum.

As you know, the reel mower has a stationary blade and multiple (4 or 5) rotating reel blades.

This link has a decent sharpening process.

A reel type mower is sharpened by first ensuring the reel to stationary gap is correctly adjusted on both ends.

At each end there are one or two adjustments to ensure the stationary blade gap is correct.

The mower drive is disassembled to permit attachment of a manual drive crank handle.

Lapping compound is applied to each rotating reel blade. The reel is manually rotated until each blade has a nice uniform surface finish. The mower is then reassembled for normal usage.

Click to expand...

Thank You yes that is what I researched also.Will give it a try.
Do you know of any shop that deals in vintage equipment?

wingless said:

Here is the link to the professional mower maintenance document with the image snippet from Hammermechanicman.

Click to expand...

Thank You very helpful.

Fonz said:

Thank You yes that is what I researched also.Will give it a try.
Do you know of any shop that deals in vintage equipment?

Click to expand...

If there is a golf course in your area give them a call at maintenance shop. They should be slow this time of year & may be able to show you how to dress up your blades.

One of the bad things about the computer age is the demise of the Yellow Pages.
Back then it was easy to look up "reel mower bade sharpening" in the index then find the page with all of them listed.
Now days we have very flawed search engines where no matter what you search for, the results always have Ebay , amazon , walmart, lowes ets in the top. followed by a mass of sites you don't want because they have paid the search engine to come up top or paid some twerp to make their site come up on top .
Thus the place you want is burried down in page 352 .
Most big towns will have a reel mower specialist.
We have a couple in Sydney .
I send reel mowers out to be sharpened .
One of my wholesalers does machining , rebores & cylinder sharpening .
Fortunately Sydney is a bad place to grown fine grasses like couch so out of over 1000 customers only 2 reel mowers

So i you intend to mow with it, pull the reel & bed knifes off ( complete with the mounting plate ) and sent them to be ground.
Don't be surprisd if you get told the bed knives need to be replaced.
Once back together, oil the blades after each use & back lap very regularly.
Some I know lap after every use.
There is a reason why lapping paste comes in 1 gallon buckets or bigger