Happy Knife Year

Hey folks, thanks for coming here to visit my Blog.

I want to talk a little about nicks and chips and broken tips and how I deal with them.

When I started my business in 2011, I never really considered how I would deal with broken knives, so when I did  consider it, I got some knives and broke  the tips off and I went in.

Now for tips, I will confess, for stuff like this I use my Belt Sander with the sharpening belts. It would take me too long to do this work on stones and I can do it much better on the belt. I can control the reshaping of the tip nicely. All the work is done from the Spine so you don't end up losing any extra length in the blade. It takes a lot of practice but is all doable on the stones too, I've done it lots of times.

Here is a little Global, sorry for the bad exposure in the Before shot.

Now chips are pretty easy too, I do those on the 220 grit stone by "sharpening" at a 45 deg angle, (Approx 45 that is), this process is very quick. It just takes a few sweeps edge trailing and a few edge leading and the nicks disappear as the edge is worn down to the same level as the "hole" in the edge. So I'm not sharpening here, just repairing, creating large burrs until the damage is gone.

You can do the same on the Edge Pro by raising the pivot arm so that the stone is hitting the very edge of the edge. 

If the nick is very deep, it takes longer of course but it works, then it is just a matter of sharpening the knife at the "sharpening angle" 

It is quite common for me to receive knives in this condition but I also find that once repaired, they don't seem to come back to me damaged, people are either being more careful or the repair and sharpening process strengthens the blade.

It just takes some courage to fix and I'm going to do a little video on it the next time I get a damaged knife.

 I undamaged them. 

 When I was learning to repair tips, I often had this hump to deal with, it is just a matter of grinding away at the spine, this knife had severe tip damage, I broke it off with pliers and played around with it until I got it right. All part of the learning process.

Most of you won't have to worry about this, you're careful with your knives.

I'll be back soon

Peter