Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and i've probably mentioned more than once that
you should start with clean and sharp blades for your pruning and propagation that's for the
benefit of your plants and today i want to show you how to do that. The anatomy of a bypass pruner
has a blade and a counter blade the blade does all the cutting and the counter blade just holds the
plant material the stem or the leaf in place while that cutting is taking place it's a flat surface
here and doesn't require any sharpening it's only the blade that requires sharpening - but not so fast!
if i sharpen this inside edge i can actually ruin the tool or at least ruin the blade so that stays
flat it's supposed to pass by the counter blade very tightly to make that cut it's the other edge
this (outside) edge of the blade that requires sharpening you kind of tell because there's a bevel there
already that's where the sharpening comes out of the factory this tool here a carbide sharpener
will make quick work of sharpening up that blade because it's a harder material let me show you how
you can see on the sharpening tool that it has a squared off edge and it has a rounded edge
we're going to be using the squared off edge and we're going to hold it at the equivalent
of about a 22 and a half degree angle against this blade here and then just run it across
it can be awkward to get that acute angle against the blade here happily you don't have to do it
more than a few times and as you're doing it i don't know if i'll get this detail you can see
little filings of the blade coming off with the carbide sharpener how do i know if it's sharp
enough well of course by testing it this should make a clean cut of foliage nice and sharp edge
there on that cut it should also go through even a thick stem with minimal effort and nice and clean
just as important in my opinion is keeping your pruners disinfected or clean in this case i'm
using just a disinfectant spray or disinfecting wipes even though the brand name on this is clorox
it is not a bleach based product and that's important a lot of people ask
whether you can use bleach to clean your blades the problem with bleach is that it's a corrosive
and so it will tend to diminish the quality of your blades over time especially if you
leave it on after a cleaning so i suppose if you use a 10 % bleach solution and you wiped it off
really carefully afterwards you could get away with that but i would prefer to use something
that it doesn't cause damage to hard surfaces and these ones here are based on an n alkyl solution
dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride in both of them actually so they're both similarly formulated
which doesn't damage hard surfaces and in this case i'm going to use the spray
just spray both sides and then wipe it down using a shop cloth
with the blade now cleaned and dried there's one last thing i'd like to recommend
which is to lubricate it in this case i'm using wd-40 the reason i like wd-40 is that
it displaces any water that's remaining so if i didn't clean that perfectly if i've
left some moisture either inside of the spring or between the blade and the counter blade
and the construction of the pruner then this will help to get that out of the way
one more factor in the cleanliness of the cut is whether there's space between this blade and the
counter blade when it closes there should be no gap up in this area here and in fact you can feel
that when you grab the two handles but in two different hands like this and just try to rock
them back and forth in this case it's very tight this one's a rather new pruner but as they get
older they start to wear down and loosen up and so with this one here i can feel as i wiggle my right
hand here there's a little knocking back and forth between in this joint here and the way to fix that
on a felco or its clones is to tighten on this bowl here to just tighten it up slightly
and that will make the pruner both tighter at this point but also have none of that gap
in between now that's probably a little too tight i'm going to loosen it out just a little so it is
actually a bit of a balance there between the workability of the blade and also the tightness
of the blade but you do want a nice tight fit between the blade and the counter blade