Chipped Blade!

J

jpgassmann

Joined
Oct 15, 1998
Messages
8
I am the proud owner of a Kershaw Starky Ridge- TI ATS 34. This is a wonderful knife I purchase from ChrisH at a very good price, and I can always have it on me. The other day I pulled it out to do some job or another and noticed several large chips in the blade. Needless to say, I was shocked! How could this have happened? I take such good care of that knife, some people hardly believe that I use it. After consulting with my close friend and knife fanatic, ChrisH, he suggested I send it back to Kershaw and I wondered if there was something else I could do. That's when this idea hit me. I need your help in this one. What do you think I should do?

Thanks,
J.P. Gassmann

Here's a link to a picture of the blade. ChrisH scanned the picture and would appreciate it if you looked around the rest of his site while you're there. Thanks.

http://www.kansas.net/~cannon/chip.JPG
 
Hi J.P. - sorry to hear of your woes with the blade on your Ti ATS-34. I took a look at the image and it appears to be very small chips in the edge. This is something that you can take out by sharpening the blade until the chips are gone. You can use a coarse grit stone, preferably diamond, to speed removal of the steel. Follow this by touching up the edge a bit with a fine grit stone. But if you would like to send the knife back to Kershaw, they will fix it at no charge (they would take out those chips in a similar method to what I described above). Hope this helps.

------------------
Dexter Ewing
Knife Reviews Moderator

"The keystroke is mightier than the sword"





 
Those chips just appeared there spontaneously? You must have cut something I suppose, like a box with staples in it or something...?

Whatever the cause, this is precisely why I have forged the opinion that ATS-34 SUCKS! It has this bad habit of chipping and there are such better steels out there now. Unfortunatly, it has caught on like 440c in the 1980's, and we probably won't see it go away for a long time, because the general public is just starting to appreciate it when the rest of us knife knuts have already moved on...

thaddeus.
 
BTW- That knife, the Kershaw Starkey Ridge or "Ti-ATS-34" as it has been named, is one of my favorite mid sized liner lockers. Great knife, great quality, but they can't help that ATS-34 is brittle and the edge chips.
 
Thanks for the advise, guys. I'll see if I can't get those chips out by sharpening. I'll tell you how it turned out.

J.P. Gassmann
 
I agree with Thaddeus. ATS-34 does everything... But nothing well. Maybe the CMP stuff will take over
 
Interesting thread. I have a Benchmade 350 that has never been used to cut anything other than soft foods. I noticed a very tiny chip on the blade, and can only conclude that as others have said, ATS34 does indeed suck if not treated 100% correct. My Leopard Cub has seen hundreds of times more use, and much harder use and it is still in perfect shape. I asked a local custom maker if he could make a knife for me in O1 or A2 and he flat out refused. He was pushing ATS 34 for whatever reason. When I told him I was less that thrilled about ATS 34, he quit talking to me. I decided to look elswhere for a maker.
 
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