How To Remove and Sharpen Your Lawn Mower Blade
“My lawn mower doesn’t stall when I cut long grass in my yard, so everything is fine.” Right? It may just depend.
Dulled lawn mower blades will go through tall grass, yes. However, if you want your lawn looking the best it can be, make sure your lawn mower blade is sharp to keep that grass as healthy as possible. Dull blades will not clip grass, they will actually rip blades of grass in a haphazard manner, and chances are that it will impair how healthy the grass will grow back. In extreme cases, your lawn can develop yellow spots, dry spots, disease and more.
If you would rather skip the manual lab
or and just get a new lawn mower blade, Ace Hardware has you covered.
If you would rather have the pros at Ace Hardware sharpen your blade for you, we have many locations that provide that service too.
Find the nearest Ace Hardware with a lawn mower blade sharpening service
Otherwise, if you’re ready to make a shopping list and get started, here’s what you’ll need.
Here’s a video where Ace’s home maintenance expert Lou Manfredini shows you how to get it all done.
Video transcript:
How To Sharpen A Lawn Mower Blade – Ace Hardware
Hi, it’s Lou Manfredini, Ace’s Home Expert. In this video, we’re going to show you a couple of ways to sharpen a lawn mower blade.
Before you do any work on the blade, what you want to do is take the spark plug off. Now, the likelihood of the thing starting is very low, but let’s just hedge our bets. This spark plug wire right here, if it’s not plugged in, the engine cannot start.
Because now what we’re going to do is tip this unit onto its side, which will prop up here. You’ll see that this is an old blade, and man, this thing is dirty underneath here. What we’re going to do is take this nut off to remove the blade.
Now, sometimes it’s righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. Sometimes it’s the exact opposite. So we’re going to have to figure that out as we go at it.
All right, so I’ve got an extra set of hands here, and I’m going to have to hold this and see if I can crack this to loosen it. You just have to take your wrench and give it a quick turn. You can see that it starts to loosen a little bit.
There we go. Now, it’s one single bolt that’s going to come off.
Okay, so now that we have the blade off, you’ve got a couple of options when it comes to sharpening it. You could use a stone like this, but that will take you a long time. If you want to speed the process up, what I’m going to be using is a Dremel tool with a blade-sharpening attachment, and I’ll show you how this works.
With this kit, there are a bunch of different attachments. I’ve gone ahead and put the grinding stone on the end. Then this guide screws onto the housing of the Dremel tool to help you sharpen the blade properly.
Holding the blade in position, this guide is going to go on the underside of what you’re going to grind. You see this blade portion here with all those nicks? I’m going to go ahead and turn this on.
The goal is to keep grinding to try and remove as many of those nicks as possible. Now, you don’t want to overdo it, because if you take too much off the blade, it becomes unbalanced. Make sure that you equally grind both sides of the blade.
If you’re not interested in sharpening the blade, the next video coming up is how to replace the blade.
