#How To
How To Sharpen Your Hedge Trimmer Blades
Trimming hedges is a breeze with the STIHL range of hedge trimmers.
The key to keeping your trimming easy, effective and rewarding is ensuring your trimmer blades are kept sharp.
With sharp blades you can trim with confidence, knowing that the cuts being made are clean and precise, and that you aren’t creating stress or problems for the plant due to tearing or breaking of the foliage.
Without proper care and maintenance, the combination of plant resin and wear and tear from thick branches will, over time, blunt the cutting blades on your hedge trimmer and begin to compromise your trimming efforts.
Staying on top of your trimmer blades means you’re not only looking after the aesthetic presentation of your hedges but safeguarding their health as well.
Keeping your hedge trimmer blades sharp is a simple process, and will extend the longevity of your blades, leaving you with a clean cut every time.
Before we explain how to sharpen your blades, it’s important to understand how to tell when they are blunt.
HOW TO TELL IF YOUR BLADES NEED SHARPENING
When it’s time to sharpen your hedge trimmers, you’ll know! While using them, you’ll notice that they aren’t tackling the hedges with the same precise, clean cut to which you’ve become accustomed. Frequent use blunts the cutting blades, so they need sharpening regularly. If your petrol, battery or electric hedge trimmer leaves behind an uneven and frayed edge as it cuts, this indicates that it’s due for a sharpen.
You can go to one of our dealers for a professional sharpen, or alternatively you can get the tool back into peak condition by yourself.
Ideally, sharpening should be done before the blades show visible signs of wear – remember that the lifespan of your hedge trimmer is heavily dependent on regular maintenance. As such, we recommend sharpening after every 50 hours of use or so, to ensure consistent cutting performance and to enable you to enjoy your hedge trimmer for as long as possible.
Quickly and easily sharpened at home, our video below shows how simple the process is.
A helpful step-by-step guide, discover how easy it is to file the blades sharp, deburr the filings with a whetstone, clean the blades down and apply the STIHL Superclean resin solvent to maintain your trimmers in premium condition.
All up, it’s ‘job done’ in 5 minutes!
It is possible, however, that the problem arises from a different issue. If you are noticing a tendency for branches to get stuck between the teeth during trimming, so they block the tool without being cut, this suggests that the upper and lower blades of the hedge trimmer are no longer meeting. It happens because the spacers between the blades wear out over time. Your STIHL dealer can easily fix this issue by replacing the spacers for you.
If you’re not comfortable sharpening your hedge trimmer blades at home, your local STIHL dealer will be pleased to help and can professionally sharpen the blades to achieve an optimal result without removing too much material.
To find your local store, visit stihldealers.com.au.
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