Build It Yourself Blade Sharpener

Build It Yourself Blade Sharpener

In reference to the sharpening Jig:

As you can see, I'm just using a cheapie miter saw with a metal cutoff wheel on it instead of a saw blade. I set it over at ten degrees, so I wind up with a ten degree hook angle on the teeth. I made a depth stop from a carriage bolt with a flat washer silver soldered on top. I set the depth stop so that the shape of the gullet is not really affected much - saves hand-grinding the gullet shape. The jig itself is basically just two blocks of aluminum bolted together and then bolted down on the miter saw deck. One block has a step milled in it that's .040 inch wide, so that when the blocks are bolted together, there is a .040 inch slot down the length to accept the blade. The two thumb screws, of course, hold the blades till while grinding the tooth. You can also see in the pics that the blade indexing stop is adjustable so that you can set it to where ever you want.What I do is set the blade in place and line up the edge of the first tooth with the side of the grinding wheel, then measure from the left end of the jig to the left end of the block that holds the indexing stop, then I loosen the block and move it over so many thousandths and re-tighten. From there,it's just a matter of grinding a tooth, then moving the blade over a too that a time, making sure each is against the stop before grinding. My blades are 11 feet long with 176 teeth and it took about 35 minutes to sharpen. The only hard part is when I get down to the last tooth next to the weld,because that last tooth is not exactly 3/4 inch from the tooth next to it,so I have to set up that last tooth by itself.

In reference to the tooth setter:

I've attached pics of my tooth setting jig. It's put together basically the same as the sharpening jig, as you can see from the pics. "set4" shows using it to set the teeth on one side, and "set6" shows it turned around to set the teeth on the other side. There is a separate indexing stop for each direction, which are "fine tuned" by shimming. Also note the Allen setscrew on each end under the blade used to set the height of the blade in the jig. "set4" also shows a good shot of the L-shaped threaded rod that actually pushes on the tooth to bend it over, and also the little thumbscrew to hold the blade still. "set7" shows a close-up of the business end.I'd like to replace the tip of the dial indicator with a flat plate so that I can measure the actual total set, but haven't yet (I took the point off and tried to measure the thread so that I could just make a new tip, but I couldn't figure out what the thread was! -??). I set the dial indicator upon one of the straight teeth and set it to zero, then go to each tooth to set it. There is some "spring-back" when you take the tension off the tooth,so you have to go past where you want the set to be by .020 or more,depending on what set you want. You soon get the feel for how far past you have to go to get what you want, and you can easily get the set within a half thou consistently. In "set5" you can see a hole under the dial indicator tip. When I advance to the next tooth, I pull the dial indicator tip back and insert a pin (shown in "set2", upper right) to hold the dial indicator back out of the way. It's kind of cumbersome doing it that way,but it keeps the dial indicator from slamming around while advancing to the next tooth, since the next tooth is actually three teeth down the blade.I've thought of a couple ways to get around that and speed up the process, but it's not a big enough deal to worry about at this point - some day when I have time to fiddle with it maybe I'll take care of it :).

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