Knife Tip Field Repair, Part I
You are out on a trip, working with your tools and your hands and mind. At the end of the day, you are cleaning your blade around a fire. You look down, and the tip of the knife is gone! Maybe you can just barely see it, because it is still sharp up there, almost jagged. Maybe a large chunk of steel is missing. You need a fix.
The purpose of this post is not to offer professional restoration of a knife tip, although the knife can appear like new if you do it right.
Have time to ship a knife, to get it to the spa, to pay someone to do it? They will probably do a great job. This is the scrappy DIY version.
Presenting the KE Bushie, tip intact:
The tip of the KE Bushie slopes down gradually from the spine, terminating in a very fine drop-point.
In my experience, tip damage becomes obvious under a 10x or 20x loupe. Rarely, it can be seen with the naked eye. For the purpose of this post, I have digitally changed the image to show moderate to severe tip damage.
The tip of this KE Bushie has been broken off and blunted.
There are three choices when approaching tip repair. Repair from the edge side, repair from the spine side, or work on both sides.
I prefer not to regrind the edge. With this method, repair is focused on the
spine of the knife.
Any coarse stone would work, or even a coarse rock. You could even try it on a concrete sidewalk. I prefer the
Fallkniven DC4 pocket whetstone. It comes in a leather protective sheath, has a small profile, and has two working surfaces. One side is diamond, and the other side is ceramic. The diamond side is very coarse and can remove metal rapidly. The ceramic side is finer and can be used to hone a knife, align the edge, or set a microbevel (all outside the scope of this post). One final piece of equipment I use is a small strop loaded with
Bark River's black honing compound.
To begin, you flip the knife so that the spine is resting on the stone. You raise the handle up and align the spine of the knife on the stone, near the tip, at approximately a 75 degree angle.
emaze.com said:
For this to work right, you'll want the spine side of the broken tip touching the stone, as well as a small portion of the spine. You will push and pull the knife at this angle along the diamond stone until the spine and tip share the same angle.
If the knife is very hard or the tip damage very severe, use only a pulling motion on the stone. Get too aggressive here, and you may break the tip a second time.
The result will look something like this:
Metal has been ground off the spine at a 75 degree angle to restore tip geometry.
In general, the tip damage and repair will be much more subtle than presented here.
In the field, you could stop here, but let's go a step further.