A knife that is past its design life is a chip waiting to happen. The four retirement criteria, the protocol for retiring and re-purposing, and how to avoid the most common retirement mistakes.
A preventive maintenance schedule catches the 80 % of premature blade failures that show up as predictable symptoms. This SOP covers daily / weekly / monthly / quarterly checks for slitter, shear and granulator blades, the inspection form, the parts replacement plan, and the line-side conditions that must be measured and held.
Outsourcing the re-grind is the right call for most converting and fabrication operations. This article walks through how to specify a re-sharpening service, what the supplier should send back, what the SLA should be, and the four questions that separate a good re-grind from a knife-destroying one.
The right re-grinding frequency balances knife life, scrap rate, and re-grind cost. Re-grind too often wastes stock; re-grind too late produces scrap. This article gives the frequency rules per knife family and the cost model to pick the right interval.
A slitting blade is the most-asked-about consumable on a converting line. The life of the knife is set by the substrate, the steel grade, the edge prep, the heat-treat quality and the in-process care — not by luck. This maintenance guide walks through the seven variables that actually drive service life.
A knife that is dropped on a concrete floor is a knife with a chipped edge you cannot see until the line trips. Storage and handling SOPs cost almost nothing and prevent the most expensive failure modes — micro-chips, rust, geometry drift — before they reach the line.