Sharp-Blade Solution
This battery-operated sharpener is portable and precise, and it works with various power-tool blades.
The Tigers Teeth Freedom Pro Saw Blade Multi-Sharpener is a compact and portable blade sharpener. It’s designed to sharpen several kinds of power-tool blades, from circular saws to hole saws, but I have only used it to sharpen oscillating multitool (OMT) blades. I use a Makita Subcompact OMT, which features the StarlockMax locking system.
These StarlockMax blades are slightly less common and, at $10 to $30 for one blade, are not cheap. This is why I decided to give the Tigers Teeth sharpener a try. The sharpener is powered by the same batteries that power your cordless tools. There are more than 15 different battery brand platforms to choose from—just select the adapter that fits the batteries you run when you buy the unit.
I take advantage of this handy feature by swapping the battery from my OMT to the sharpener, keeping the blade attached to my OMT. The sharpening process is simple: Just push the dull blade into the grinding wheels until you have ground new gullets about the same depth as the original ones, then move it over by half a tooth slot and repeat the process.
Sharpening an old blade doesn’t take much longer than installing a new one. Whenever you use a grinder to sharpen a blade, the heat generated from the grinding wheels could affect the heat treatment of the blade and negatively impact the blade’s durability, resulting in a resharpened blade dulling faster than a new one.
However, I haven’t noticed any meaningful detriment to the blades I’ve sharpened. I’ve had the sharpener for about a year and a half, and the quality of the cuts after sharpening is more than sufficient. I’ve cut through hardwoods like oak and maple, as well as engineered products like LP SmartSide, with nice, clean results.
The Tigers Teeth Freedom Pro Saw Blade Multi-Sharpener is not cheap and isn’t a tool for everyone, but I’ve resharpened a couple dozen blades with it already, so in my case it’s paid for itself. Sold online at tigersteethblades.com for $225, the base model comes with cubic boron nitride grinding wheels for regular/bi-metal OMT blades.
For an extra fee, Tigers Teeth offers diamond grinding wheels for sharpening carbide-tooth OMT blades and additional accessories to help sharpen specific-brand blades more precisely and faster. There are also optional side wheels used for sharpening those non-OMT blades.
— Josh Blye, lead carpenter at Kolbert Building in Portland, Maine
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