Worn blade drives

No posts for over a month and you get two in a row.

So what is a blade drive and why does a worn one cause problems?

Clippers work by pushing the cutter blade side to side on top of the comb which provides the cutting action.

The vast majority of clippers have a motor which spins. Therefore you need to turn this rotary action into a reciprocating motion.

This is normally done by the blade drive which locates into the cutter at one end and it then pivots about a central point with the other end being driven by a crank.

If this was facebook i’d probably end here and have a little video it’s not facebook so lets wander into the weeds

The original design from oyster many many years ago didn’t use a motor it used an electromagnet which is a linear motion which is all nice straight lines. So they made the sensible choice of making the drive peg for the cutter square.

This square drive peg has carried over to modern clippers.

Yes we have a nice square thing moving in an arc. To make things better we make the square thing from plastic and shove it into a hardened metal socket. There is only going to be one winner here. And its not the plastic thing

Not square any more

So a combination of a legacy design, plastics and poor design choices mean that the blade drive wears REALLY quickly.

You’ll find 6 months being a very common replacement interval. Which is why you should be getting this changed out regularly by your trusted sharpener. At the same time we will blow the hair out of it and change the grease.

Now what if you don’t do this?

Well you will have a noisy clipper as well in really bad cases your blades won’t cut well.

I have done a wee before and after video on a set of clippers I came across recently

Hopefully you can hear the very obvious difference here.

As this is a gradual process you won’t notice a step change in your clippers noise or performance.

If you want us to have a look at your clippers we can easily accept mail order or in you are to the south of Aberdeen then drop us a line and we can come to you, or you can come to us and meet the inspection team.

And if you are 200 miles to the south of us then you are in the north and you should be speaking to Ryan at Northumbrian sharpening

As a wee end note this really applies to dog grooming clippers which are also used as trimmers in the horse world. Large animal clippers which take the larger blades have metal drives and are normally round so they don’t suffer from the same issues with the blade drive. That said horse clippers need servicing just as often as they have a harder life and you never clean the filter do you!