Aaargh! The tip of my Zytel Native broke!!!...

[Flood]

Yesterday I take out my Zytel Native and open it to discover...the tip broke! I never even noticed that it did, and I have never used the knife to pry stuff. I also don't remember having it fall open tip-first to the floor, although I DO remember it falling sideways a few times. Who knows, maybe the tip did come into contact with the floor or another hard surface without me noticing.
Well, this saddens me because it was my very first Spyderco knife, and it's my favorite daily carry (besides my BF Native). Soooo, I wonder...how can I best fix it? Here are the two options as I see it:

1) Should I send the knife back to Spyderco for them to do the job? Is it covered by the lifetime guarantee, or how much will I end up paying for the job? Anyone? Sal? Or,

2) I have a 204 Sharpmaker which I used only to sharpen the blade edges, yet have no idea how to work it to fix and resharpen a broken tip. Should I use the Sharpmaker to do this job? If so, comments on how to "restore" the tip would be greatly appreciated, since I don't want to experiment with it only to ruin my beautiful Native.

Thanks in advance,

-Flood

 

[Novadak]

I did the exact same thing to my Native about a year ago, friend of mine threw it into the road, open, and the tip snapped off. I re-did the edge on a flat coarse bench stone, and it came out okay. I wasn't even smart enough to think of sending it back to Spyderco, though.

 

[glockman99]

Flood,

Why don't you post this on the Spyderco Forum so that Sal may reply directly?.

.

------------------
Dann Fassnacht
Aberdeen, WA
glockman99@hotmail.com
ICQ# 53675663

 

[Flood]

I tried, glockman99, but have gotten very few responses so far. So I decided to try this forum, since so many more people favor it over manufacturer forums and "hang out" here more often.

-Flood

 

[RH]

I had the very same thing happen to my Delica last week (my first Spyderco). I noticed the tip was squared off, just a teeny tiny piece missing, but definitely no longer pointy. What I did was to re-profile the point from the spine side, by rubbing the spine/tip on the flat of the coarse Sharpmaker stones. You will need to basically alter the tip geometry, else you would need to regrind all the way back to the hump in the blade. So, essentially the top of the knife now goes in the factory line towards the point and then has a subtle drop off to make the point in the last 1/8 inch or so. Hard to notice unless you know it's there.

The benefit to this approach is that I never touched the cutting edge, so it's still sharp.

This may not be a good approach if you lost a bigger chunk off the tip, but with the Native false edge, there is less metal to remove, maybe if the Sharpmaker stone doesn't work, try a coarser bench stone first (maybe even a bench grinder, if you're careful).

At this point (pun) I would be more concerned with utility than beauty. It's only a $40 knife anyway, so if you can re-grind some semblance of a point back, you'll be back in business with a user knife, and the tip you create will actually be meatier & stronger than the original.

To see my thread, and the responses, do a search on 'squared' in the title for the last 10 days in the General forum.

nevermind, found it: http://www.bladeforums.com/ubb/Forum64/HTML/000607.html

Good luck !

[This message has been edited by RH (edited 11-26-2000).]

 

[CK]

Flood,
You'll probably get a response from Sal Glesser when he gets back to work on....Monday.

 

[Blades]

A friend broke his Delica tip. He took a good chunk of it off(prying). I used the fish hook groove in my 203 stones to work it back to shape. It worked well. Good Luck.


Blades

 

[Samurai6]

If every knife owner who ever broke the tip off of a knife blade wrote to the CEO of the company for help....well, never mind.

When I broke the tip off of my Native (dropped), I filed the point back on with a stone file. They are course grinding stones with wood handles, sold at most hardware stores for sharpening lawn mower blades. Took me about ten or fifteen minutes.