Scissor sharpening
 

On Mon, 07 Jul 2003 20:42:56 GMT, Steve B
wrote:

Where do people get their scissors sharpened, and what are the results?

I never sharpen my scissors - most of them can't be anyway.

Scissors can be honed, and this is quite easy. Honing is working on
the edge of the blade, not the flat. If you use a small diamond stone
(people like DMT sell these quite commonly now) and you're careful to
preserve the angle, then you can do most pairs at home. Obviously not
serrated pairs, but half-serrated pairs can still benefit from honing
the straight edge.

After many honings, scissors lose their set and need a full
re-sharpening.

Sharpening scissors means working on the flat too, and this will
destroy the set (the adjustment of the blades on the pivot).
Sharpening is no harder than knife sharpening, but re-setting can be
awkward. Cheap scissors can't be (cheesy riveted pivots) and big
shears may need a non-straight sharpening to the edge, so as to
maintain an ideal set pressure all along the edge, and this takes a
lot of practice to get right. If you want to learn, find a few S/H
pairs of tired old pre-war shears with about 8" blades and practice on
them. They'll usually restore to perfect (not just good) condition.

Basically, don't mess with the set. If they need doing and they can
be, then you're probably talking about a $100 pair of shears that have
already given several years of service and need a commercial $10-$25
service to bring them back into line. For these, they're worth sendng
them away. Most commercial sewing suppliers (Morplan in the UK) can
do this for you.

Some big shears have spring-loaded pivots. These are primarily to
reduce the force in using them, but it also makes them self-setting
for most of their lifetime. Sometimes these can be sharpened without
re-setting.