Rattling blades

A rattling blade isn’t an uncommon thing to encounter but it can be caused by many different things and unless you know what to look for it can be hard to work it out. It can be the clipper or it can be the actual blade.

Today I got in a blade where you can actually see what is going on. If you look carefully you can see four dots on the socket. This comes from the newer Heiniger hinge which has 4 dots on the tongue of the hinge.

If you have a blade that is noisy and you can see those 4 dots then I suggest you send it off to be sharpened and let the sharpener know it is noisy.

What is happening is when the blade drive pushes the cutter sideways you get a turning motion on the hinge. To stop the blade from twisting there is two small ears on the blade which go either side of the hinge which resist this movement. What has happened on this blade is that these have splayed out.

This lets the blade twist which can be seen in the picture.

The blade then moves around which causes noise as well as reducing the travel of the cutter which results in poor cutting performance.

If you look you can see the ear to the left is bent

Measuring the gap it is 17.5mm at the top

The way this is fixed is using a tool that a sharpener should have. This is put between the ears and they are squeezed against the tool which should set them to the right width

After doing this the measurement is 16.4mm

After doing this the blade no longer rattles.

If you have a blade that rattles then you can try squeezing the ears yourself but be wanted if you squeeze them too much then the blade won’t fit easily on to you clippers or even worse they won’t even fit

if you want to see more about the process of sharpening a clipper blade then go HERE