Rotary Blade Sharpener Review

This post is about my personal, unsponsored and uncompensated review of the Colonial brand "Turn-Sharp" Rotary Blade Sharpener I purchased from my local quilt shop - Sew Together - for $35.99 plus tax. Polly special-ordered it for me.

After asking blog readers and Instagrammers for rotary blade sharpener opinions last December (see that blog post here), this is my own unbiased review of the product I bought to try.

I have dozens of used 45 mm rotary blades to sharpen.

I followed the instructions. 

The first thing to do is identify the parts. Then, with water on your fingertip wet both sides of the inner ring of the whetstone. The light-colored center is the coarse whetstone. The opposite side has a darker-colored ring that is the fine side of the whetstone. Also note that the sharpener comes only with a whetstone for 45 mm blades. Size 28 mm and 60 mm whetstones are available separately.

The blue part inside the sharpener is the whetstone ring with the coarse side up. The handle assembly is what I'm holding in my hand. It has two parts into which the used blade is nested, and then screwed into place.

The handle assembly is set into the whetstone ring, and the turner/crank is snapped into place. Slowly crank the handle - one second per rotation - 10 to 15 times. Turn over the rotary blade in the handle assembly and repeat to sharpen the other side of the blade. 

Then, turn over the whetstone, to the fine side, and repeat the process, cranking 10-15 rotations on both sides of the rotary blade. At this point, I wanted to handle it carefully, and used needle nose pliers to put the blade in my rotary cutter.

After wiping the metal dust off the blade, I put it in a rotary cutter to... 

... test the blade on an old t-shirt.

I found more than one blade still had a burr. 

So, I repeated the entire blade-sharpening process... mostly with success! 

The whetstone collected metal dust, so I used an old rag to wipe it off.

After sharpening ten blades, repeating the sharpening process on four of them, I saved eight of the ten blades! The refreshed blades are now stored in a specially-marked container, ready to use.

The two rotary blades that are definitely goners are in their own special case.

To me, this Turn-Sharp is worth the money because I expect to return most of my 45mm blades to a reusable condition. And even if I can't save them all, I will have saved enough of them to make the investment in the sharpener worth the price. 

Here's a 2½ minute video I made of the entire blade-sharpening process that I hope you find helpful!

If you use the Turn-Sharp Rotary Blade Sharpener, I'd love to hear about your experience with it. Linda