VCM blade sharpening

So the blade for our vcm cutter is pretty dull putting unnecessary stress on the cutter. How do you guys go about sharpening the blades. Do you do it yourself or send it out? We use the cutter everyday so really cant be without the blade. How hard would it be to do this ourselves?

We send it out. They charge us $20. Needs to be done every year or so for us.

Yes send it out to a
reliably
company
George mills

Going against the grain. I sharpen my own.

What do you use to sharpen

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I use the the sharpening stone they sell at Home Depot. Its about $10 with the oil. You can Youtube videos on knife sharpening to get the theory of it. It’s a little awkward to handle the knife unit without a vise but it’s not impossible. I used to send mine out but got the same result doing it myself. It didn’t cost much, it was just inconvenient.

I have a whet stone and I do our shop knives so I will try it out was just wondering if I needed something stronger my husband wants to have at it with his dremmel

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Georgia;
I hate to say it but…I think the quickest way to ruin an otherwise perfectly good, though dull VCM cutter blade is to allow your husband to have his way with it. Unless you REALLY know what you’re doing, stay away from the power tools, especially those not designed specifically for blade sharpening, for sharpening your VCM cutter blade. I build custom knives as a long time hobby so I know a LITTLE about blade sharpening, I use a hand held, flat, diamond sharpening block (about $50.00) to touch-up the edge about once a year, but every other year we would send it out to be professionally sharpened as this will restore to original/correct angle to the edge over the full length of the blades.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

This blade had not been sharpened for at least 7 years (yes I know real bad maintenence) there was absolutely no edge to this thing so he gave it a rough edge it took him about 5 minutes and gave me a good head start to what would probably had taken me days to do by hand and I’m going to finish it off with the stone.

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Georgia;
I’d plan to send the blade out for professional sharpening at the first convenient time. There might be someone close to you that can do it, check with your local hardware store, many times they have someone who comes in once or twice a week to sharpen saws, knives and chainsaws so you might be able to get him to do it as an urgent request (typically an hour or less). Once you have the edge restored you will find it much easier to maintain the edge over the course of a couple of years or so before you have it professionally sharpened again. Just a thought.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

Thanks for the info Tom didn’t think about checking the hardware store will look into this. The only local guy is an appliance store that does knife sharpening just doesn’t seem like they would be up for the job.

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I wonder why?

In our town of 12K people we have several options. There is a tool service that does sharpening (but is so busy it is hard to get in and he wants to hold things for several days… “drop it off, I 'll call you when it is done”), the local kitchen shop owner does sharpening overnight and there is a traveling guy that comes by a couple of times a year. The traveling guy is the best because he works from his van. Pulls in to the parking lot, come in and asks if anything needs to be worked on… does it right then and gets paid cash.

Our town is an interesting town the people who live here are “locals” they have been living here all their lives and they want to keep it a small town feel where everyone knows each other and they do. They are against progression and growth and this is a town of 65000 people so I don’t get it. They had a community that was developed in the inland part of town that went up 10 years ago people still complain about it. We had an outlet mall that just opened up last month and the community fought this thing so hard it took the developer 18 YEARS to build it it was so bad the coastal commission got involved and now that it’s up and running people want to boycott the thing. Anytime some knew development pops up people complain “what is happening to our little Spanish village by the sea”. I’m new here it’s been about a year and a half and the people are great don’t get me wrong but the place is stuck in the 70’s. It’s a great place to do food business people LOVE to support local family run businesses but it’s soooo laid back its a mission to find people to work. Our town on many occasions is referred to as an island. People are all about san clemente and keeping it small town feel.

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And I can attest to living in a community that cuts its nose off in spite of its face because they want to keep us ‘small’ but what they don’t realize is they’re creating a situation that this town is soon to become a ghost town… there’s really nothing left for tourists to do here! In fact, although we do have a good number of local customers, we get better reviews and raves about our product from the tourists! Our population is less than 1,000 in town and roughly 6,000 in our entire county. Keeping it ‘small’ is killing our economy… Not to mention it has grown more and more difficult to find people to hire who understand what WORK for PAY means! Way too many people here live on assistance and they’re very happy to receive a check for not working…