At which angles do you sharpen your scissors?

[tcmeyer]

Yup, they look high-dollar.  I wonder if they can be taken apart like the one in your earlier photo.

Checked a couple web sites and they go from $80 to $150 for the Five-Star curved scissors.

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Brewbear

[Richard]

How the heck do you even begin to tackle a blade like that with a concave curve?

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Brewbear

[Organic]

The high dollar scissors that hair stylists use are often sharpened with a convex grind. I don’t think the WE is a good tool for maintaining these scissors. There is a very expensive ($5,000 or so) that is specifically designed for sharpening shears. The name of it escapes me at the moment, but I will edit this post if I think of it.

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Richard, Scott DF, NotSharpEnuff, Alan, Brewbear, Marc H

[tcmeyer]

I don’t see the curved edges as the barrier to sharpening this scissors on a WE.  The main issue for me would be “adapting the adapter” for the high angle desired.  Would the Tormek adapter be rigid enough?

Assuming one wanted to proceed, would the anticipated income offset the expected costs of developing and fabricating a workable adapter?

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Brewbear, Richard

[Richard]

Organic wrote:

The high dollar scissors that hair stylists use are often sharpened with a convex grind. I don’t think the WE is a good tool for maintaining these scissors. There is a very expensive ($5,000 or so) that is specifically designed for sharpening shears. The name of it escapes me at the moment, but I will edit this post if I think of it.

My wife was asking her stylist what she did and according to her, she coordinates with her scissor vendor and they send her a pair of loaners while she mails hers in and they sharpen them.  She said that’s standard practice in the salon business.

[Richard]

tcmeyer wrote:

I don’t see the curved edges as the barrier to sharpening this scissors on a WE. The main issue for me would be “adapting the adapter” for the high angle desired. Would the Tormek adapter be rigid enough? Assuming one wanted to proceed, would the anticipated income offset the expected costs of developing and fabricating a workable adapter?

That’s the funny thing, I’ve practiced using standard cheap Fiscars and didn’t have a problem so I was surprised when I couldn’t get the wider angle on the WE.  Are you talking about an adapter for the Tormek?

[tcmeyer]

The WE adpater clamps on the blade and the Tormek clamps on the handle.  My comment was referring to modifying the WE scissor adapter to reach the spec angle for the scissors, but you also may need to modify to handle the curved blades.  If making these mods is not reasonable, would the Tormek adapter hold the scissors’ handle steady enough to produce the required result ?

My experience with the Tormek adapter has always been adequate, if not very good.  Our standards for angle accuracy has been skewed by the precision we expect from the WEPS.  Before the advent of the ball joints and micro-adjustments, we happily lived with probably 1/3 of that accuracy and the Tormek adapter seems to do better than that.   If it can indeed clamp the handle solidly.

We normally look for about 0.1 degree accuracy, but consider that 0.1 degrees amounts to about a 6″ error at 100 yards.  What the high level of precision gets us is assurance that we can hit the apex reliably.  Even with this degree of accuracy, we really need to depend on optical assistance to confirm that we are indeed hitting the apex.

The source of the greatest error from the WE seems to be the repeatability of the stone-face-to-rod-centerline distance.  If you’re going to confirm the angle with the aid of a handheld microscope anyway, I think the next source of error would be the steadiness of the Tormek adapter, which depends on if it can clamp the handles properly.  Something I’ve never done.

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Marc H

[Author]

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