Dead on Arrival

We can’t fix everything, sometimes some things are just too far gone due to age or in this case due to a previous hamfisted sharpening attempt.

Two pairs of pinking shears arrived at Barras blades for sharpening. This should be nice and simple

Two pairs of pinking shears brought into Barras blades for sharpening. Shouldn’t take too long.

Then I had a closer look. It appears that someone has had a go at these with a bench grinder, as the end of one of the blades was a light blue which shows it has been overheated which is easy with a typical aggressive bench grinder

With pinking shears they have a section called the lap line. This is where in the factory the two halves of the shears are lapped together making a matched pair. This stands up as a shiny section once this is gone the shears are dead. But a professional sharpener will be removing a few thou each time so this will take many years to run out.

They should be sharpened to between 0º and 10º. So the top of the blade is either flat or has a slight slop down from the tips. A typical household pair of scissors will be about 40º. this pair had a negative angle of maybe 25º. So when they cut the blades are pushed apart so they would never work.

Anyway on with the pictures.
I have brought in the wifes pinking shears to show how they should look

You can see the negative angle on the bottom pair

A very old pair of shears with the lapline still visible

You can just see the very slight remains of the lapline on a few teeth

The 2nd pair haven’t faired much better with half the line line basically gone

A very from the end showing the 0º grind that it should be and the negative grind which is completely wrong

A nice little sign that this has been overheated on the last tooth which will soften the metal

I don’t like telling a customer that their equipment is beyond repair. I am sure that the intentions to sharpen these was good but in this case this is two pairs of pinking shears destroyed.

If you don’t know what you are doing either hand them over to myself or ask for advice. If you bring them to the workshop then i will happily show you what i am doing. Yes you might not come back to me as a customer but if someone asks then i would hope you will remember me favourably. This applies to anything from knifes, scissors to clippers.

Some cannot be sharpened without specialist equipment such as clippers, pinking shears and beauty shears. But knifes, chisels, garden tools can easily be sharpened at home with a minimal investment in some hones.