4 Excellent Tips on How to Sharpen Your Gardening Tools with a Bench Grinder

If you own a garden, you know that besides enjoying its beauty and relaxation, you need to do a lot of hard work to maintain it. And in maintaining a garden, tools play an important part. Again you have to maintain tools too. Besides tools like spade, shovel, dibber and trowel, you also need tools like lawn mower, scissors, billhook and others which have blades that need to be sharpened regularly so as to get the best performance from them. A bench grinder is a wonderful tool for this purpose. Here are tips on how to sharpen your gardening tools with a bench grinder.

1. Never Use a Vice

Because of the great speed associated with a bench grinder like the one by TopBenchGrinders, it’s generally an instinct to use a vice. Typically the vice will keep the blade in place while it’s being ground down to a sharp edge. This is a temptation that should be kept away since sharpening a blade is never a linear process. This means, to get a perfect edge, the blade should move with the grinding wheel naturally.

2. Perfect Angle

Gardeners often make a mistake of placing the blade flat on the bench grinder wheel. A blade should never be sharpened with its side flush against the grinder. It will shine the blade but won’t sharpen it. To get a sharp edge, the blade has to be angled towards the grinding wheel. Often a 45-degree angle is the best to use while sharpening a blade.

3. Keep the Movement Natural

In case of knives, most flat knives have a curvature on their blades. When you use a bench grinder to sharpen a knife, follow the natural curvature of the blade always. As you sharpen the blade, the grinding wheel will start pulling the blade automatically into it along this line. Here you should not fight against the grinding wheel but should follow it naturally instead. While holding the blade on the grinding wheel, you should never keep it in one place. The grinding wheel moves the blade and so should you. Don’t fight the natural friction of the wheel and blade but control it. Move the blade along the wheel in an extremely timed and even way. This will sharpen your blade evenly.

4. Allow the Bench Grinder to Do the Work

Many beginner bench grinder users tend to apply a lot of pressure in the blade while grinding. It’s a great mistake that can result in chipping of blade and losing control on the blade. The grinding wheel spins extremely fast and doesn’t require your effort to sharpen the blade. You just have to set the blade on the grinding wheel at a perfect angle and let it do its work along the natural curve of the blade.

Follow these tips to maintain your tools to their best and sharpest edges so that you can have a perfectly trimmed garden always.