How to sharpen hair clipper blades very easily

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Over time, the clipper begins to cut worse due to the dullness of the knives. They leave gaps and sometimes pull hairs out by the roots, making it impossible to use the machine any longer. This problem can be solved by sharpening. Restoring the cutting edge of machine knives has its own specifics that you need to know so that everything works out perfectly.

How to sharpen hair clipper blades very easily

Materials:

mirror or glass;
sandpaper P800 and P3000;
container with water;
dry rags.

Knife sharpening process

To sharpen, you need to remove both knives from the machine. They are usually held in place with just two screws. When disassembling, it is important to act carefully, since many machines have a spring between the knives, which is not always secured, so it can fall out.

Knives are sharpened only on one flat side. It is necessary to remove the potholes, scratches, and possibly traces of corrosion that have appeared on it. To do this, the knife is wetted in water and the flat side is applied to P800 sandpaper placed on glass or a mirror. This lining gives a perfectly flat surface.Then you need to press your fingers into the center of the knife and move it along the sandpaper in a back-and-forth motion, trying not to shift the pressure to the side. Shifting the pressure point will cause the edges to wear off, but you need to remove the entire plane evenly.

Periodically, the knife should be washed in water to remove small grains of metal and abrasive from the paper. This will allow you to evaluate the plane. On P800 paper, rough scratches must be completely removed.
After sharpening with a coarse abrasive, the surface of the knife becomes matte. Next, you need to rinse it under running water to completely wash away the smallest adhering grains of sand.

Then the knife is wetted again in a container with fresh, clean water and polished using P3000 sandpaper placed on a mirror or glass. This abrasive will bring the surface of the knife to absolute gloss. He will become like a mirror.

After sharpening to a mirror, the knives need to be treated with oil. It is applied drop by drop onto the rubbing surfaces. Then the knives are installed back on the machine. It is important to do this the same way they stood before. What matters is the protrusion of the lower knife beyond the edge of the upper one. The fact is that the clamping screws have play, which makes it possible to move the knives relative to each other a few millimeters to the side. Before disassembling the sharpening machine, it is important to look at how they stood, or better yet, take a photo, and then install them back in the same way.

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Comments (18)

#1 Guest Yuri Guests 20 April 2020 14:46
9

The working side of the knives is not flat, but concave! Therefore, sharpening knives on a mirror (and especially window glass) or any other flat surface is a very good way to ruin them.

To properly sharpen knives, a special device is used - a conical faceplate - which precisely ensures the desired curvature of the working surface.
- Answer
1. #2 Guest Guests 20 April 2020 17:54
  6
  
  I have never seen concave knives. I sharpened it on the glass with sandpaper and it worked.
  
  Answer
  1. #3 Guest Yuri Guests 21 April 2020 10:57
    3
    
    It is impossible not to meet them - they are all like this from the factory. Just the angle of deviation from the plane is 1 degree. Given the size of the knives, it is impossible to notice it with the eye.
    
    Here is one of the videos where you can watch a sample of a homemade machine:
    
    And here is shown the assembly of another homemade machine:
    
    Pay attention to the required hardness, cleanliness of surfaces and precision of installation and compare with sharpening on sandpaper, which bends under the knife like a swamp underfoot.
    
    Answer
    1. #4 Vita Guests 22 April 2020 08:21
      3
      
      I watched the video, it’s useful, but attention would need to be paid to the design features of the knife and sharpener.. What if you combine sandpaper and rubber?
      
      Answer
      1. #5 Guest Yuri Guests 22 April 2020 18:24
        2
        
        Attention would need to be paid to the design features of the knife and sharpener.
        I can explain the design features of the knife on my fingers. Literally.
        Take your palm (preferably yours) ) and bend it slightly. Then bend the other palm in the same way, and then put these palms together. The palms will touch in two places - at the wrists and at the ends of the fingers. This is the clearest model of clipper knives.
        If you hold your fingers not bent, but straightened (but so that they still touch only the ends, and there is a gap between the palms), then you will get a model of knives without the curvature of the working side. This option does not have any advantages, and it will cost much more to produce.
        
        This is all done for the same reason why the blades of scissors are made curved and intersecting.
        By the way, if in that model one palm is slightly moved relative to the other, then the fingers will also fall into the gaps between the fingers and intersect. This is exactly what should happen when cutting. Otherwise, the knives will not cut the hair, but chop it.
        
        The sharpening equipment is a disk made of hard metal, the working side of which is a cone with an angle of deviation of the generatrix from the horizontal of approximately one degree (craftsmen experiment with angles of almost 0.2 degrees). On the surface of the cone May be a spiral groove was made for better retention of the abrasive (shown on YouTube in many videos). That's all, actually.
        
        If you have a lot of extra time to get unnecessary information, then with a quick search on the Internet I found a couple of forums:
        "Sharpening knife blocks of hairdressing machines"
        "Sharpening knife blocks of hairdressing machines 2"
        "Forum for sharpeners of Hairdressing and Manicure Tools"
        You just need to read more than the first 2-3-5 pages of large topics, because people usually just begin to gain experience and knowledge on them.
        
        What if you combine sandpaper and rubber?
        It will be even worse than without tires. For sharpening, the abrasive must be as hard as possible. (This does not mean abrasive grains, but the entire “working fluid” taken together.)
        Imagine that you have a steel cube with perfect corners (more correctly: edges). The surface of this cube is blued, and you want to remove this blueing. Place the cube on a soft abrasive and press down. What will happen? The surface of the abrasive will be dented, forming a bend near the walls of the cube. If you start moving the cube along the abrasive, the coating will be sanded off on the pressed side. But the edges of the cube, due to the bending of the abrasive, will be sanded much more strongly, and at the end of the process you will get a clean side and rounded edges.
        But the fact that the model cube has ribs is the cutting edge in the case of knives.
        
        Therefore, even kitchen knives are sharpened on hard stones. And on sandpaper - completely out of despair.
        
        Answer
        
        #6 Hermann Guests June 8, 2022 10:21
        1
        
        The idea of sharpening on a cone is well understood, but there are several questions:
        1. The cone has a different radius of curvature, perpendicular to its working plane, at different distances from the center of this cone. Does this matter for sharpening?
        2. Is it possible, instead of a faceplate, to select a pipe of a certain radius and sharpen it manually on the cut out sector of this pipe?
        3. In this case (see point 2), the movement when sharpening the knife will be across its plane, and not along, as in the case of sharpening with a faceplate. Does the direction of movement of the abrasive matter (along or across the knife)?
        4.If option 2 works, then what diameter should the pipe be?
        
        Answer
        
        #7 Yuri_ Visitors 13 June 2022 19:56
        0
        
        Yes, sharpening on a cone does not give an ideal result - the teeth located closer to the top of the cone have a deeper curvature of the groove than those located further away. But it seems to me that the same curvature is not required at all, just as no specific value of this curvature is required. In the end, no one cares at what exact distance from the top of the cone the sharpening occurs.
        
        An ideally identical tooth shape can (purely theoretically) be obtained by sharpening on the surface of a cylinder (pipe). But in order to obtain the kind of surface curvature that a conical planar washer has at a distance of 10 cm from the top, you need a cylinder with a radius of almost 600 meters (with a diameter, respectively, twice as large)! Actually, sharpening on a cone is a palliative solution, caused precisely by the inability to use a cylinder.
        And if you take a cylinder of an acceptable (for use) radius, the teeth will turn out to be very curved, and during operation they will “fall” through each other too much. Accordingly, in order to then pull them out, it will be useless to waste part of the motor power, and the motor is already quite weak on the machines. As if it turns out that the remaining power is no longer enough for the actual cutting... (And in the worst case, the motor will not be able to move the knives at all.)
        
        As for the direction of sharpening, this is akin to the eternal debate about how to sharpen knives - with the blade forward in the direction of movement or backward.
        However, if we assume that the knives of the machine work like scissors, then it seems to me that transverse sharpening is better - the micro-teeth formed on the blades will better hold the hair when cutting. (We remember that metal scissors and even household scissors intended for hard materials have special notches on the blades.)
        
        But there is one "but". There is a big “BUT”: if the machine begins to cut hair poorly, this does not mean that the knives have become dull. The reason may not be in them at all.
        
        I've been using my machine for 14 years. Never sharpened it. Eight years ago, she started cutting hair very poorly; it seemed as if instead of cutting, she was simply pushing the hair forward from the knives. I naively decided that I needed to sharpen it. And at that time I only knew about sharpening that it had to be done on sandpaper glued to the mirror. It’s good that I thought about something in time and came to my senses. And I started thinking about why knives can push out hair. Based on the results of my thoughts, I conducted an experiment - I took a small piece of paper and stuck it in a certain place on the machine. The result of the experiment: with this piece of paper, the machine began cutting hair almost like new. This is how I used the piece of paper ever since.
        Of course, over the past eight years, that piece of paper has lost its original miraculous properties (to put it simply, it fell apart). But I just threw it away and put another one in its place.
        
        Naturally, I do not claim that the solution I discovered will help everyone. But the cherished word is “backlash”. Because of which, the movable knife has the opportunity to rotate slightly relative to the vertical axis (perpendicular to the plane of the knife).
        
        Answer
  2. #8 Guest Yuri Guests April 21, 2020 11:04
    2
    
    Concavity of surfaces is not an end in itself, but a side effect of sharpening on the side surface of the cone. The knives can be flat, but their planes should not be parallel, but intersect at a very small angle, so that the knives do not touch the entire surface, but only the very tips.
    They sharpen on a cone because it is technologically simpler.
    
    Answer
    1. #9 Guest Igor Guests 25 June 2020 20:39
      2
      
      Explain to me, please, what does the cone have to do with it?!! The generatrix of the cone is a straight line, the knives turn out completely flat, straight, that’s it. But even if we assume some necessary technological curvature of 1 degree, then two knives folded facing each other should give a gap in the middle, and not a tight fit. To avoid a gap, one knife from a pair must be sharpened on a cone at +1 degree, and the second at -1 degree! Those. have two faceplates. In my opinion, we are dealing with a legend passed from mouth to mouth and a banal misunderstanding of the geometry of the process. I am wrong?
      
      Answer
      1. #10 Guest Yuri Guests 26 June 2020 23:18
        3
        
        Explain to me, please, what does the cone have to do with it?!! The generatrix of the cone is a straight line, the knives turn out completely flat, straight, that’s it.
        
        Take a flat square plate and try to press it against the side surface of the cone (the same one formed by the straight line) so that the plate is pressed over its entire surface. Can you?
        
        But even if we assume some necessary technological curvature of 1 degree, then two knives folded facing each other should give a gap in the middle, and not a tight fit.
        
        Right! It is precisely the gap between them that should exist. And they should touch only the very tips - just like the halves of folded scissors touch the tips with a gap along the entire remaining length.Because machine knives should work exactly like scissors.
        
        In my opinion, we are dealing with a legend passed from mouth to mouth and a banal misunderstanding of the geometry of the process. I am wrong?
        On YouTube you can easily find videos of sharpening knives on a cone, including those with detailed explanations by the masters about the essence of the process.
        
        Answer
        
        #11 Palkin Mikhail Vladimirovich Guests August 4, 2020 09:51
        5
        
        And machine knives are cut not with the tips of the tooth, but with both sides of the side surface of the tooth. Therefore, the teeth of the upper and lower parts must fit as tightly as possible.
        
        Answer
        
        #12 Guest Yuri Guests August 5, 2020 01:15
        2
        
        In scissors, the blades never touch each other along their entire length; they always touch only at one point.
        
        The same is with the blades of knives of hair clippers: they are slightly curved, so when the upper knife moves, each of its teeth sooner or later ends up between the teeth of the lower knife and, due to the bend, gradually first falls between them, and is later forced upward again.
        
        Answer
2. #13 Palkin Mikhail Vladimirovich Guests August 4, 2020 09:32
  3
  
  If you follow your advice, then EVERYONE!!! tooth in the center, to create a cutting edge on both sides of the tooth, you need to make indentations. Then it will look like scissors. And this is a utopia...
  
  Answer
  1. #14 Guest Yuri Guests August 5, 2020 01:06
    3
    
    in EVERYONE!!! tooth in the center, to create a cutting edge on both sides of the tooth, you need to make indentations. Then it will look like scissors.
    
    You get the feeling that you have never seen scissors.Well then, at least watch the first of the videos suggested above, paying attention to where the teeth are directed during the sharpening process, and then figure out in which direction the surface bends as a result.
    
    Answer
    1. #15 Palkin Mikhail Vladimirovich Guests 6 August 2020 19:51
      1
      
      In scissors, only the edges of the blades touch, the inner part of the blade is higher than the outer, plus the blades are each slightly bent inward, due to this, the cutting part is formed only at the point of closure.
      and the machine cuts with the entire plane of the tooth. And sharpening scissors is fundamentally different. with scissors, only the side part of the tooth is spent, and with a machine, only the “sliding” planes
      
      Answer
      1. #16 Guest Yuri Guests 7 August 2020 23:12
        3
        
        plus the blades are each slightly bent inward, due to this, a cutting part is formed only at the point of closure.
        Here! And the teeth of the hairdressing machine are also curved - for exactly the same purpose! The only difference is that with scissors the blades are curved entirely by bending them, while with the teeth of the machine only the inner (working) side is curved as a result of its grinding on a curved abrasive surface.
        And the supporting part of the blades of scissors is the platform near the axis, and for machine knives it is not the base of the teeth, but the heel of the upper knife. Therefore, the teeth between the teeth fall safely, forming intersections of the edges.
        Yes, they fall down by hundredths of a millimeter, but that’s enough.
        And sharpening scissors is fundamentally different. with scissors, only the side part of the tooth is spent, and with a machine, only the “sliding” planes
        This is because the teeth of the machine cannot be reached to the side. But to obtain a sharp cutting edge (either from a machine, from scissors, or from a knife), it makes no difference which of the two sides of the blade is ground.
        
        Answer
#17 Vita Guests 21 April 2020 02:08
4

Yes, sometimes it’s useful to read the comments. Live and learn.
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#18 Palkin Mikhail Vladimirovich Guests August 4, 2020 09:17
2

Is there a perfect mirror on the sandpaper? O..o.. . I sharpen it on glass with oil and Goya paste, and the surface is always matte.
- Answer