you ever had to replace the blade on a lawnmower? maybe you need to sharpen it. or maybe you just want to put a whole new blade on it well in this video we're gonna show you exactly how to do that. i'm monica and i'm jack and we're with the gardening products review to remove the blade you're going to need a couple of tools the one that's gonna be the easiest to use is this one which is a socket wrench and that's something that not everybody has so if you don't have that, don't worry about it you could use just a regular wrench or an adjustable crescent wrench. the thing you've got to make sure is that the opening on this - or the size of your socket - is going to fit over the nut on the blade
we're going to be showing you how to replace the blade using this cordless mower. it's a nice one from redback we do have a review of that on our website. if you want to check it out at gardeningproductsreview.com what we're gonna do with this mower is exactly the same as what you would do with an electric corded mower or with a gas mower. there are just a few different steps at the very beginning so first things first: safety. really important; you want to make sure that this is not gonna start when you've got it upside down and your hand's in there trying to get the blade out of there. so with an electric mower like this one, we're gonna remove the battery before we do anything and if you had a corded electric, obviously you would unplug it
now with a gas mower, would you do anything different, jack? uh, yeah with a gas mower we'd actually recommend that you run the gasoline to it's end. go mow your your lawn until your gas runs out the reason being is that when you flip your mower on the side the gas will start leaking out the side the other thing that you want to do on a gasoline mower is remove the spark plug wire so that there's no
incident of the mower actually starting right. safety first. i would suggest wearing a pair of gloves - you're dealing with a sharp mower blade they're also nice when you're cleaning out the under side of your mower which is an opportune time to do that when you've got it up on its side the second thing you're going to do is you're going to take the bolt out of the center of the the mower blade we're going to turn the bolt in the same direction that the actual blades are cutting so in this instance, i'm going to turn the bolt in this direction, it's the straight edge here. that's the cutting side. this is the side that makes it mulch and
chop things up, right? so it's a sharp edge that you're looking for and if that's the direction of the blade is going to spin now there are also mowers that have really different looking blades they've they've gotten - it looks like there's almost two blades stacked on top of each other but again one side is going to be straight. that's the direction it's moving and then there are some mowers like remember the the greenworks twin blade mower? it's got two separate blades. so what we're going to show here is exactly the same thing as you're gonna do with that, except you're gonna do it twice right? there are two bolts. there are two blades. you've just got to take them both out okay. so you're going to spin this, turn this in the direction that the blades are turning
yeah you might run into a situation where this bolt is really really tight because these are made to be self tightening - the more it spins, the tighter it gets one way you can get that bolt out is by using something called a breaker bar so jack has one here which you just put on the end with your socket. and what it does - with the longer handle - it gives you a lot more leverage so you can really crank on that thing to get it nice and loose. if you don't have a breaker bar, you can always use, with your wrench,
you can put a pipe over the end. again, you're just trying to make the handle longer so that you have more leverage. right. you can also do it with your socket wrench as well. put a pipe over it to get the same distance or leverage. put a pipe that's about that long on to your socket or your range, as monica was saying okay. so what do you what do you do next? you've got you've got this loosened. i know you have a trick that you do with a piece of wood instead of having to hold on to the blade yeah, normally i take a piece of 2x4 and i'll actually stick it in and in the place where it would actually jam the blade, so this might be a good demonstration
where you know you have to spin the bolt in this direction (same way as the cutting blade) so you jam a piece of 2x4 piece of wood or a stick in there and you just you know after you start to loosen it or if you need to use your breaker bar you just literally start cranking on it, you'll eventually loosen it. okay, so then you're able to just take this bolt out oh! okay, so there's a piece
do not lose this! you don't want to lose this piece right and the other important thing that you're seeing here is that this particular blade, so that it doesn't spin on the actual shaft itself, has two posts that stick out here. so when i take this off you'll be able to see that i've got a couple of holes here and i've got two posts so it's really important to align these two together when you're putting the blade back on because if you didn't align it, your blade is going to eventually spin right off the mower. there's something that i kind of noticed with this blade
it actually is telling you the direction in which it spins. it spins this way. that's your cutting edge so take a look at your blade not all of them are going to have this but some of them are going to have a direction indicator, which is a really nice feature and this part is going to look a little bit different on every mower but they are all going to have something like this that's gonna hold the blade in place so it doesn't just randomly spin around. that's true so you've got it off. great, so you can sharpen it or you can get a new one what do you do next? you put it back on, right?
now it's really important here - one thing to know it is to put it on correctly right! so make sure that it's facing the right way when you put it back on exactly basically, what you want to have here is that you want to have the cutting blade down as low to the ground as possible you know if you had a mower where you could actually flip the blade over then you'd have the mulching portion of the blade close to the ground and that's not what you want so, again, get that blade nice and close to the ground. okay, so you hold it in place, now you're going to put
this back in, right? yeah, you basically have a bolt and a washer on the bottom of it so basically, whatever comes off has to go back on - in the same order so if you're in any doubt, lay the pieces out in the order they came off so that you can put it back in in the same order. yep! okay, and then you tighten it up? yeah we're gonna tighten this counter to the actual blade itself and again, you can use i use
closed end wrenches or you can use an open end wrench, this will work fine as well but you can push down on the blade and you can push down on the wrench simultaneously to tighten this. many people will ask, "well how tight shall i actually tighten it?" in a perfect world you'd have a torque wrench which would actually give you the specifications, but most people don't own one of those. *laughs* yeah, i have one of those sitting in my garage. exactly! so without a torque wrench, you know, our suggestion is you just tighten it as tight as you possibly can so again wearing gloves and pushing down on this wrench as tight as you possibly can that's going to give you a nice secure
fit and again, as this thing spins, it's designed to self tighten. yes. to some extent i mean if you put it on there really loose it's not going to self tighten, but if you've got it tight, you should be fine. yeah and that's it. that's all there is to it. right? yeah. it's pretty easy flip it back up, on a gas mower, attach the connect the spark plug again put the battery back in your cordless, and you're ready to go. yep, put some gasoline in your gasoline mower so that's how simple it is to remove and replace a blade. now keep watching our channel we've got some videos for you on how to sharpen this and make sure it's properly balanced, because that's another part of
being able to mow a really good lawn so thanks for watching this video. don't forget to subscribe there's a little box right down there and check out our website at gardeningproductsreview.com i'm monica and i'm jack and we're with the gardening products review. that was stupid