Sharpening a Silhouette Blade with Tin Foil: Test Results

Alright so perhaps you've heard the advice that sharpening a Silhouette blade with tin foil will breathe new life into a dull blade. Well, my friends - I have too. And last week when I cut an intricate design and had the vinyl tear I went through my checklist of reasons why my blade wasn't cutting properly.

Three cuts later..I finally gave in and changed the blade, but kept the rest of the settings the same and whatdoyaknow: perfect cut!

So it was the blade after all and I'm just cheap and stubborn. I didn't throw that blade out yet though - I wanted to test out this little tin foil experiment since clearly the blade was dull.
I mean it couldn't be due to the fact I had used the blade every.single.day for the past year or anything. Ya know. Actually up until last week I was cutting vinyl on a blade depth of 1 instead of the recommended 2 because the blade was that sharp.  But then yesterday - before my three-peat tearing episode - I went and cut three full sheets of magnet paper and cardstock which clearly dulled my blade. 

Anyway back to why you're here. I figured I'd try to sharpen my Silhouette blade to see if I could get a few more uses out of it.  According to some blade sharpeners you can ball up a piece of tin foil and use it to sharpen the blade. So that's what I did.

I formed a golf ball size piece of tin foil, removed the white cap from the blade, and then proceeded to stab the blade into the tin foil ball at least 100 times. I mean I didn't count - but it had to be close to 100.

I put the blade back in the machine and attempted to cut the exact same vinyl with the exact same cut settings and the exact same design....



Wah wah wah...didn't work. My vinyl still tore. It even tore in the same places!

I took the blade out and "sharpened" it more before giving it one last go, but I got the same result.

So put your tin foil away, throw out that old blade, and stop wasting your vinyl because the moral of the story is: If you've been cutting with the same blade for a good long time AND you've exhausted every other reason that your machine is not cutting just suck it up and shell out the $7 or $8 for a new Silhouette blade because you're wasting that much in vinyl anyway.

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Thanks for coming to class today at Silhouette School.  If you like what you see, I'd love for you to pin it!