Today's challenge is to sharpen two pairs of pinking shears that are a bit on the blunt side.
Much googling suggested:
Cut some alumnium foil with them.
Cut some sandpaper with them.
Use a Twice as sharp sharpening machine - or a Tormek.
Send them away to a professional sharpener.
Buy new ones!
But I am not convinced by any of them - either that they work, that even if the foil/sandpaper work it isn't only a temporary improvement, that they are worth it (haven't got a suitable machine and certainly can't afford one for this purpose only). And I have a memory that it was discussed here a while back - not that I can find it.
Absolutely - first thing I checked. Seems fine. The teeh seem to mesh well and it really does seem like both pairs simply need a litle sharpening - they work but not as well as thy should.
Yes - saw that but have no machine! Am very dubious of my ability to emulate that using, for example, some diamond sharpening tools without totally screwing the shears.
My grandfather owned a clothing factory, and I saw him sharpening them a couple of times, but I was too young to pay enough attention. It involved disassembly and sharpening each jaw on a india oil stone. We still have one pair somewhere, but I suspect they are a very expensive professional pair, as they are fully disassemblable, including removing the separate jaws from the frame. Before the clothes factory (and long before I was born), he owned a hair dresser, and I would guess he was well into resharpening the scissors and razers there too.
He was very much in to very sharp cutting implements. The original cutting table in the factory used something like a carving knife to cut the patterns through many layers of fabric all at once, using knifes which had to be extremely sharp, and frequently resharpened. By the time I was old enough to remember, this had been replaced by an electric knife suspended from the ceiling.
His knife sharpening was quite legendary when it came to carving up a roast. He would sharpen the carving knifes on a steel, but he would finish them off, or retone them, by sharpening two knive blades against each other (which I presume is what he did with the cutting table knives), and I wish I'd paid attention to how he did that. The only difficulty was if someone else then carved the meat, as you carved straight through the bone before you realised you'd hit it.
Have seen a very few butchers do that knife-against-knife sharpening - if I did it, I'd end up with two blunted knives. :-(
Unfortunately, while these are perfecty decent shears, they are certainly not at the end of the scale you wrote about! Quite sure they do not disassemble.
Shame we all managed not to pay sufficient attention to loads of things where later we wished that we had.
I think even if you can't arrange for a grinding wheel and a mounting, a diamond studded 'steel' of the sort used to sharpen knives and a steady hand, should be able to do the job on a blade clamped in a vice.
Essentially the issue is to remove the rounding in the serration tips. And the tip in the video of using a felt pen to black the surface, and then honing back to overall fresh metal should work.
On 16/10/2012 11:42, The Natural Philosopher wrote: ...
Not everybody has a steady hand. I've never made pinking shears, but was involved in a factory that made scissors. There, it was very important to use the right grit abrasive for sharpening. The cutting edge needed very fine serrations to work best; too fine a finish impaired the quality of the cut, while too coarse a cut caused them to catch on soft materials. Unfortunately, decades later, I don't recall what grit we used. Our test was to make a clean cut vertically up a piece of free-hanging open weave bandage.
That point was also made on one of the sites I visisted in my quest. I think they said 800 grit was the finest they use.
I have now tried to do the diamond approach and it made a considerable difference to one pair, but only slight to the other. In both cases it has helped reveal beyond doubt that there is a small bit of the blade that is plain wrong! Nearest the throat is fine. The far end is OK (and that is what improved very much from my sharpening). But at about two thirds along there seem to be a couple of teeth that do not mesh properly and hence do not cut well.
I might try some more, but think that a new pair might be in order. Anyone know of Ernest Wright?
All too many companies have been taken over and quality evaporated. I appreciate that they might have been excellent 10, 50, 100 years ago but what I care about is the shears I might buy today.
Unfortunately, Sheffield is not what it used to be. I knew a number of people in the forceps and scissor trade and, in recent years, they all suffered the problem that faces many people in skilled engineering. Their skilled staff are coming up towards retirement age and very few younger people are interested in getting their hands dirty to learn those skills.
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