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RE: Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 06/25/18> There must be a government regulation…
When we owned our home I had the old reel type lawn mower. Those blades were interesting to sharpen! The sharpening kit included a hand crank and a sort of large-grit rubbing compound that you brushed onto the cutting edge as you cranked the blades backwards. It took some practice but once you got the process down in really worked. Afterwards, the mower would probably slice a sheet of paper.
Yes, I am very familiar with back lapping reels and sharpening the bed knifes on reel mowers. I spend some time working at a golf course when I was younger and the course had several reel mowers for cutting the greens that were walk behind models. There really isn't a finer cut that can be done than with a reel mower, and you sure are right about slicing paper, that was one way we check them as we were sharpening the mowers.
The lapping compound you had to be real generous with it and you could hear the "clicks" get fainter and fainter as the blades got sharper. Was this mower you had a push mower with no engine or did it have an engine? I remember as a kid using the push one with no engine for a small little area my mom planted with a special type of grass that needed moved with a reel mower.
This one was a manual model reel mower from a company called Sunlawn. We had a fairly good sized city lot, so it was exercise, but I was okay with that too. As long as the blades were sharp and the cutting height wasn't set too low it wasn't bad at all. I used it for the entire eight years we owned the house.