Fix Kitchen Knife Tips with Ken Onion Edition Worksharp?

E

Evolute

Joined
Mar 19, 2001
Messages
4,769
The other day, I was given two used sets of kitchen knives (Guy Fieri set and Martha Stewart set). The knives are in decent shape, but the previous owner ground off the sharp, pointy knife tips when resharpening them.

To the degree that I'm competent sharpening knives at all, I'm only competent sharpening them with my Ken Onion edition Work Sharp. Is it possible to grind sharp pointy tips back onto these kitchen knives with a Ken Onion edition Work Sharp? If yes, then how?

Thank you for any help you can provide.
 
Yes, you can regrind tips on knives with the WSKO. I've done quite a few including some broken and heavily blunted tips.

To do it, you need to look at the tip closely. Look at where the curves and lines come together. The idea is to try to see what line you can draw through the existing shape to make the intersection a sharp point again. Most of the time this means spending some extra time at the first one inch of the knife and simply removing the rounded profile and replacing it with a nice straight line. In more severe cases, you may have to grind back more of the edge in order to keep a natural looking curve/line from the base of the blade to the tip, while still removing enough material at the tip so that it intersects the back side of the knife at a nice apex.

Sometimes you can grind the back side (unsharpened) where it comes down to meet the edge. However, it's easy to alter the knife geometry when doing this and I try not to unless it will look good or it's a last resort.

Brian.
 
Here's an example of the Worksharp guys fixing a broken tip on a Ken Onion grinder. You can do the same thing without the grinder by taking off the sharpening guide on the base unit. Probably overkill in your case since you're only dealing with a blunted edge.

 
That worksharp video was a really nice demonstration. He didn't say it exactly, but he showed an important lesson: knowing the geometry of your blade before you start is a key point. You want to preserve the original geometry as much as possible. Depending upon the blade shape, this changes your approach to the repair. Grinding up from the cutting edge. Or grinding down from the spine. Or a combination of both. All 3 are valid approaches depending upon the original blade geometry.

I'm no expert. I've just repaired a couple of dozen damaged tips. There's always something more to learn.

Brian.
 
I did as the video showed, and fixed the points on a dozen or more knives. It worked fantastically. Thank you all, again, for your help.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top