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How To Replace A Utility Box Cutter Knife Blade

The box cutter, or utility knife, is an excellent tool found in almost every warehouse. Designed with a small blade, these knives have the ability to quickly cut cardboard boxes open, remove packing tape and other wrappings used in freight transit. Due to the abuse box cutters take, they are often made from very hard plastic or metal.

Many warehouse employees view utility knives as throwaway items. As soon as the blades wear out warehouse workers will typically begin looking for a new one. Fortunately, you’re company does not need to waste money repeatedly buying new box cutters every week. A simple remedy is just to replace the blade. And the best part? They normally come with extras!

 

Opening The Utility Knife 

The first step when replacing a box cutter blade is to figure out how it opens. In our example, we only need to use a Phillips head screwdriver and remove one screw from the side. After removing the screw you can simply pop the top off which splits the knife in half.

 

Identifying Components

There are really only five components to our utility knife. The handle, the screw, the blade, the blade housing and the pack of replacement blades. Once the blade has been opened, we can remove the blade housing and blade from the knife.

Make sure when you reach this point you pay attention to how the knife sits in the housing. After noting this you can remove the knife from the housing and dispose of it safely.

 

Replacing Blades

The replacement blades are normally wrapped in a little pack. They often come in sets of between three and five. You will want to carefully remove these blades from the knife handle so you do not cut yourself. Then unwrap the blades and remove one from the package. After you have a new one out, place the other blades back into the handle.

Now take the new blade and seat it into the housing the same way the old one came out. The blades in this knife have a two notch system which needs to get placed correctly back into the housing. This creates a nice firm hold on the blade.

 

Putting The Box Cutter Back Together

At this point, we will want to start reassembling the box cutter. Place the blade and housing back into the handle, ensure that the extra blades are seated properly and then place the top of the handle back onto the bottom. Then fasten the screw back into place and your utility knife is as good as new.

*When fastening the screw back into place you want to make sure to snug the screw but not over-tighten it. If you over-tighten the screw it will compress the handle and seize up the blades movement in the handle. To mitigate this, tighten and then check by opening and closing the box cutter a few times to make sure it is at a comfortable resistance to opening and closing.

 

Our Thoughts

We are using a standard metal box cutter in our example but many blades work in the same or a very similar fashion. Utilizing these blades will end up saving your company a fortune in the long run. Make sure you educate employees on the extra blades (if available) or have an employee who can change them readily available to change blades out for the other employees. The type of box cutter we used, after spending about five minutes on it the first time, we were able to change a blade in about two minutes. Making it significantly cheaper to have someone change the blades than to just buy more.

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Replacing a Utility Knife & Box Cutter Blade

Utility/Box Cutter Blade Replacement Transcript Scroll Down To Continue Reading Bob: Welcome back to Albany County Fasteners – Fasteners 101. Today I want to show you how to properly change a blade in a utility knife. Lets get started. So I have my utility knife here. This is just a standard utility knife. This is like a five dollar utility knife. You can get more expensive utility knives, unless you’re a contractor or or one of those guys that are using it professionally every day, this will do. This is a very simple unit. Now I’m going to show you how to change the blade properly you need a number two Phillips and we get out of my case here. OK and i’m just going to unscrew this Phillips screw right here. I’m gonna take that out. Remove the screw and then you just pop this top off. This whole mechanism comes out of the utility knife, like a casing, and then in the back, typically in the back of the utility knife itself, they give you a little package of additional blades. In this case they give you four extra ones. So you take the blade out of there, you take the mechanism that it snaps into. So now, there are two holes. There’s only one you can get it into alright, so two slots they see those two slots you can only get it into one and that’s the only way will fit. It should fit snug in there, you shouldn’t get a blade that is sloppy and moves around and it should just fit perfectly as I’m showing you here. Once you have that, you can just slide this, put it back in there, but the key to this is pushing this down so it will slide back and forth. Now when you put the top on, there’s a lot of people running into this problem. If they don’t put that in properly it won’t adjust for you and then this is like a hinge you just snap it in like that. Before you put the screw, when you start screwing it, make sure that you have rotation; that it’s sliding back and forth for you. Put the screw back in, just snug the screw, don’t over tighten it, I just tighten it. I just tighten it till it stopped. There you can see that it was free. A lot of times people over tighten this, put all their muscle into it and then in this case it’s not happening but in some utility knives it will not function properly. There you go. Thanks for watching.

 

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