Tuesday 24 February 2015

Repairs with Coarse Stones



Hi,
I am not exaggerating when I say that for every 10 knives I get, 3 of them have significant damage. However, this is only applicable to hand made Japanese knives and some brands such as Shun.

I very rarely receive any Henckels, Wusthof or Grohman, or similar brands of knives with any damage to the edges. Broken tips caused by a mistake but not chipping.

The first picture doesn't highlight the nicks in the edge very well but believe me they were present. It must be disappointing for folks who purchase expensive knives like this only to have them damaged. I don't know if it is neglect on the owners part or an issue with the steel, the heat treatment and I suppose that in many cases it is both. 

The good news is that with the right water stone, this stuff is easy to fix and I used a 220 for these knives. The average time is 15 minutes to remove the nicks but sometimes it is 45 min as in the case of the really bad Shun below.  
I doubt you will need to worry about this too much but if you do get a nick, get the coarsest stone you can and just "sharpen" it at about 45 deg, you want to remove the metal all along the edge evenly until you have reached the "bottom of the hole" so to speak, as far up into the blade as necessary. This of course will remove the edge but that's okay, it is a simple sharpening after that.

This is one aspect of sharpening where a little courage is needed but trust me, it is very rewarding work. I have seen videos of repairs being done at 90 degrees, but I like to work at 45 or even 55 deg, and raise a burr over and over until the damage is repaired.

I will do a video on it.









2 comments:

  1. Incredible job to perform just with whetstones! The missing parts in pic 1424359349940.jpg are quite big.

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  2. Sorry it took so long to see this one, Comments are not appearing at the bottom of the posts. Thank you, yes this took a lot of work on a coarse stone, I see this quite often unfortunately but it is easy to repair, you just need patience and of course, a decent coarse stone.
    Peter

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