How to Sharpen a Cigar Cutter with Aluminum Foil

An Easy Hack for Keeping Your Cigar Cutter Sharp

If you use a double blade cigar cutter like a Xikar, Colibri, or similar style cutter and noticed that your cuts are getting a little sloppy, it’s not you—it’s the cutter. As an avid cigar smoker you’ve probably cut too many cigars to count. Additionally, odds are you didn’t think about cleaning your cigar cutter until it was obvious that it wasn’t cutting as cleanly as it did when you first bought it. Like a master chef’s carving knife, your cutter blades will eventually become dull—even those models with the hardened steel blades. Dull cuts can not only leave a bumpy surface or annoying shreds of tobacco on the head, as sometimes they can affect the draw. To be clear, what the following tip does is help remove the burrs that form on the blades more than sharpen it. Nevertheless, by removing the burrs, you are essentially sharpening the blades to the point where burrs no longer interfere with your cuts. To really sharpen your cigars you’ll need a file or a cigar store or manufacturer that does it. We’ll save that for another tutorial.

Keep Your Cigar Cutter Clean

Most of the junk that forms on the blades of your cigar cutter comes from the oils in the tobacco that are dragged onto it. They’re not always easy to see, either. If you tend to wet the cap of your cigar in your mouth before cutting, saliva gets onto the cutter, too. (That’s why I usually resist sharing my cutter and vice versa.) Therefore, just cleaning your cigar cutter with alcohol and cotton swabs on a regular basis, say, once a month, will do the trick. Cleaning helps a lot, but it doesn't necessarily remove the metal burrs that form on the blades over time. So, before deburring or sharpening your cutter, you always want to clean it. After that, you’re ready to do the following.

Removing Burrs from Your Cigar Cutter

Leave your toolbox in the garage. All you need for this hack is some aluminum foil—heavy duty preferred, but any duty will work.

• Tear off two 4-to-5-inch wide sheets of foil.
• Fold each sheet lengthwise into a thick strip narrow enough to fit through the opening of your cigar cutter.
• With your cutter open, place about 1 to 2 inches of the first foil strip through the opening and cut.
• Repeat the process from one end of the strip to the other, then do the same with the second strip.
• When you’re done, wipe the blades with a soft cloth or use a can of compressed air to blow off any residual metallic dust.

Deburring is Good, But it’s also Temporary

When you’re done, try cutting a cigar and you should notice an improvement. If not, you can repeat the foil process again, but it’s important to note that deburring is only a temporary fix. If you smoke a lot of cigars, you’ll need to do it again at some point. Of course, the quality of the cutter blades plays a part, too. For the most part, deburring your cigar cutter works pretty well and may even keep you from having to shell-out for a new cutter sooner than later.