Lee from Augusta of Whatcom County demos the RBG 712 rotary blade grinder, which sharpens mower blades in under two minutes and produces a consistent 30° edge with minimal skill required. The machine removes less metal than their old Ryobi bench grinder and cuts training time for crew members, though blades may need a quick touch-up after grinding.
Hey everybody, it's Lee at Augusta of Whatcom county, the office manager. And today we are going to do a video. Not really review video per se, but just talking about, once again, streamlining, making things more efficient and trying to make things better for our crew and simple. So that way people are more productive. Within a couple weeks of working here, they're gonna start making money, they're gonna start being profitable, and it's quick turnover. Training time, right? They're not training for weeks on end to get started here. They're training very quickly to get up to speed here. So one of the ways we're doing that is simplifying the way we keep things together here at Shop. So Mike did a video. Josh is going to put the description in the description. You'll see a link to the video of tax write off purchases that we did and this was one of them. So we actually went ahead and got the RBG 712 rotary blade grinder here.
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Lot of good reviews. There's lots of other guys on YouTube that are talking about this thing. Lots of people online just love it. And I've heard that a lot of local mechanics and shops actually use these. When you take your blades to a shop to get sharpened, a lot of them will be using this as well. So for us, what we've been using to sharpen our blades was actually just a small Ryobi bench grinder. So you can see it here still works great, totally fine to use, but one of the disadvantages is you have to be kind of trained how to sharpen a blade on a bench grinder. In order to get the proper angle, you have to hold it a certain way and tip a certain way and kind of cut it on three or four different planes in order to make sure you get a consistent cut across that blade. So it takes a little bit of training and ultimately it's going to take our guys, you know, 10, 15 minutes of blade on this to make sure it gets done properly. Now stepping Forward to the RBG712. This guy is going to sharpen blades in five minutes or less and it's going to make a really precise, clean 30 degree cut every single time. All you have to do is insert the blade like so into the slot here, make sure it is nice and even, and then all you would do is make sure it's stabilized and the blade is on a nice flat plane and then you just pull back while this rotary wheel is spinning. So we'll turn that on and get some shots for you. This is Actually my first time using this guy. So we're going to see how it goes. Hopefully it goes well. Hopefully it saves us time. So we're just going to let it rip. Obviously, when you're grinding, best to use protection equipment. So I got my gloves on today and then I'll toss my EY pro on and we'll get going here. So let's give this guy a shot.
So first cut on there, we'll just talk about that. I applied really light pressure on there, so you can see. Got a nice clean cut already, but still need to get maybe, you know, a millimeter or two down to actually get the fine edge of the blade. Some reviews did say that this does leave a little bit of a bubbling effect on the edge, so we might have to clean that up with a standard bench grinder or angle grinder. But that for the first cut, I am really impressed. Very light pressure, very easy resistance. You saw, all I did is kept this hand on top to guide and this hand to pull back. And really very simple, very clean cut, very smooth. So let's go ahead and do that a couple more times and see how it turns out.
Yeah, I am impressed. This is awesome. I mean, very fine edge on that blade. I can feel it through the glove. Like I said, a little bit of bubbling. And at the end here, definitely going to need to clean that up. Probably just with an angle grinder or the bench grinder to get a better cut on there. But really impressed. Take off a very, very small amount of metal. Not a lot of flaking and debris as you saw. If I apply more pressure, obviously we're going to get a little bit more, which, you know, in the mid mowing season we're probably going to apply a little bit more pressure to make sure we get a nice, really deeper cut and new angle on that. But overall I am really impressed with this guy. And I might just put it through one more time to work that. Maybe hop over to the old Ryobi bench grinder and really clean up the bubbling on that edge and get the tip out here. But overall, really impressed so far. And you know, real time, you're watching this half a blade. I did it in less than two minutes. So we love that for efficiency, speed, we can get a new guy in here after a couple of weeks. Show them how to pop the blades off and on a mower and then how to slot them in and pull backwards. Right? So that's, that's what we love about it. Real simple, real easy to get the new guys up to speed.
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Awesome. And then if I just get the bubbling off on the other grinder, I think we should be good to go. But overall, very impressed here.
Yeah, love that. I mean, nice really clean fine edge there. Overall, you know, a nice flat 30 degree cut. So we know our clippings are going to go up nice and high and really going to get a nice clean cut. Took off the bubbling there with that edge, but as you can see, really clean overall. Still might need a bench grinder or an angle grinder as auxiliary to really clean up that fine edge there. But insanely impressed with this machine. The RBG 712, we love it. We're going to get our new guys trained in here. You know, we got three guys that are kind of our shop guys that take over and have a role here at Augusta to make sure that our equipment is up to date. But man, we can expand the blade sharpening to a lot more guys because it's a quick, easy, efficient way to get your guys trained on how to sharpen blades. As you can see here, we run 10 mowing crews. We have a lot of blades right now. They're not all sharpened. And honestly, I can tell you some of these that were sharpened the old way with the Ryobi bench grinder aren't nearly going to be as sharp as this RBG 712 is going to make them. So wanted to give a quick shout out. Brian's Lawn Maintenance did a great review on this guy. Actually persuaded me to want to buy it. So thank you, Brian. Appreciate your content, man. And if you like this video, leave a comment like share and tell us how you sharpen your blades. Are you going to get an RBG 712? You going to stick to the angle grinder, bench grinder, whatever's best for you, let us know. Have a good one.
