Chipper blades

maggies dad

maggies dad

TreeHouser
Joined
Apr 13, 2011
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201
Do yall sharpen your own chipper blades? Im running a 12" C/D, and have a great guy that sharpens my stuff. I was wondering about touching them up on bigger jobs to save the time of changing them out. Where do yall buy your blades? Any good deals out there? If you do touch em up what do you use to do it. I have a few big jobs coming up , and they are out in the sticks, and no electricity. Thanks
 
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Thats kind of what I figured, but I thought it was worth a shot. I need some new blades right now, so guess its time to start shopping.
 
Call a couple larger tree services in your area..or a rental shop. They should be able to steer you to a sharpening service. Normal cost is about $1 per inch of knife surface to be sharpened, or $14 for a double edge 7" knife.

Half decent quality knives can be found for a reasonable price at zenithcutter.com. Bailey's carries Simonds, which are better.
 
Accusharp blade sharpener http://www.wesspur.com/saws/hand-pruners.html. Helps to keep the edge decent between sharpenings. Careful while sharpening. I suggest either some heavy leather gloves or a chainmail fish filleting glove, which I've seen for about $10. I've been known to do it with Atlas, but make my employees wear something more protective in a full leather glove.

This is probably more important on a CnD than a feed wheel chipper.
 
Angle grinder used sparingly between sharpens,quick brush on cutting edge while still on machine??
 
No just an angle grinder with grinding wheel,just as a touch up to the knives.
 
You can do what you want but the only good method is on a surface grinder with an angle plate and a magnetic table .Might not be a bad idea to keep a spare set of knives on hand also just in case you find a surprise .
 
SouthSoundTree said:
Accusharp blade sharpener http://www.wesspur.com/saws/hand-pruners.html. Helps to keep the edge decent between sharpenings. Careful while sharpening. I suggest either some heavy leather gloves or a chainmail fish filleting glove, which I've seen for about $10. I've been known to do it with Atlas, but make my employees wear something more protective in a full leather glove.

This is probably more important on a CnD than a feed wheel chipper.
Click to expand...
I'll second the Accusharp it has saved me some money and time between sending them out.
 
I almost bought a 4ft bed knife grinder from our local sawmill but got beat out by a wood turner who got it for under $2,000. These are the heavy duty industrial grinders that weighs about a ton that all the big sawmill companies use with 220 power. Lay all your knives in a row up to 4 ft long and then wet grind
I've seen a few of these grinders for sale on the net time to time. I had a local machine shop grind my knives but they no longer do it. Have been buying the Zenith knives from Sherrills fo $30 pc.

I will have one of these big grinders by winter.
 
A good grind and set makes a world of difference how they run .You get that thing out of kelter and run big long stringy chips you just plug the danged chute .

The bed plate gets worn out in the middle you just waste more time fiddling with the thing than the cost of new knives would have been .

Chippers are just like any tool with cutting edges .Chainsaw ,milling nachine whatever .Dull tooling just makes your life miserable .
 
Like the stump grinder. It has actually some very rough cutting edges, far from sharp, but when they are really dull, working with that becomes a pita. Even the poplar is difficult to deal with.
 
HolmenTree said:
I almost bought a 4ft bed knife grinder from our local sawmill but got beat out by a wood turner who got it for under $2,000. These are the heavy duty industrial grinders that weighs about a ton that all the big sawmill companies use with 220 power. Lay all your knives in a row up to 4 ft long and then wet grind
I've seen a few of these grinders for sale on the net time to time. I had a local machine shop grind my knives but they no longer do it. Have been buying the Zenith knives from Sherrills fo $30 pc.

I will have one of these big grinders by winter.
Click to expand...

We have one, and yes it is very heavy!
 
We could do it for you, it just may not be right away. We moved it to a new spot, and my dad was going to help me get the 220 ran to it. I was also going to call Morbak and see if they could walk me through making sure all of the adjustments are set properly. If you are interested in a month or two, I would be more than happy to help you out. That's when I will need to be sharpening mine too.
 
That's cool you have your own. I too passed one up in the classifieds at one time. They get around a $1.50 here for sharpening. Woulda been nice to have one of my own, and offer it to others.
 
Anyone ever used treestuff's knife sharpening service? I'm about to send a set in, but they are pretty trashed so I'm interested to see if they'll even do it. It's 99¢ an inch


love
nick
 
Nick, did you hit something serious? If not, why would they get used to that point where you wonder if they can be sharpened? I imagine it would at worst be like a rocked chain if you didn't feed a shovel of rocks, some will have to come off, but you can get back to good metal. How many sets of knives do you have? Have you used a hand sharpener along the way?
 
We send ours out to RDO/Vermeer. Very reasonable. I drop them off and pick them up. I get to talk about them and get a head's up if I need to buy some more. I won't touch Zenith anymore, only Morbark blades. Made in the USA, nope, we do not touch them up.
 
Not owning my own tree business, I've been fortunate enough that once the day was over, I went home and didn't think about tomorrow until it came.

But I can't tell you the times throughout the years, where I would come back to the shop at night -— and there would be my boss- sitting on top the chipper, shoulder deep in the blade well. He always made sure they were razor sharp for us. I also can't tell you how many times I got the sauce for dinged up blades either....
 
In addition to running a knife saver tool over my ‘straight’ blades every 3-7 hours of chipping and liking the benefit of that I just saw a new tool on the Morbark chipper website called Bevel Buddy that allows you to sharpen 2-3 times on the machine before you have to pull the blades and do a proper sharpen. Looks promising for minor touch ups.
 
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