Knife Repair

Below are some examples of repairs I have completed for customers. My most common repairs are chipped edges and broken tips. Repairs may include cleaning, rust removal, polishing, regrinding, sheath retreating and occasionally replacing missing or broken parts. These repairs are meant to restore the knife's functionality and not meant to be “museum quality restorations”. I am still learning to do mirror polishes, so for now am limiting my polishing to various degrees of satin finish. I also do not yet work on folding knives.

I really enjoy repair projects; they can be challenging at times, but the results are always a great reward to me. I like being able to take a tool that a person can’t use anymore, or is reluctant to use because it is in disrepair, and make them proud and happy to use and look at that tool again.

Click to enlarge pics
This is a very typical repair. A customer brings me a Chef's knife with the last inch or so broken off (maybe they were trying to replicate the ABS mastersmith bending test or something), and I fix the tip so the knife will have a point again. Many kitchen knives from Japan have a tip identical to this, so it I think it works well aesthetically; at least better than looking at a broken tip. Sometimes, if only a small portion of the tip is broken off, I can regrind it so the knife has the same profile it had when it was new, only slightly shorter. I get a lot of these. To some people, kitchen knives must bare a striking resemblance to crowbars.

This knife (a Cold Steel SRK) was presented to a customer when he was in the National Guard. While hunting he killed a blacktailed deer and when butchering it proceeded to use this knife to try and break the pelvic bone. I don't recall if he got through the bone, but he did a number on the edge of the knife. A few more chips and I could have sharpened each chip and called it a bread knife. A small portion of the tip was also broken off. So I reground the bevels on each side with a slight convex grind, just in case he wanted to hack up anything else, and fixed the tip. The sad thing is, the next fall he was hunting with this knife and lost it in a brushy creekbed. I tried to get him to tell me where it was so I could go look for it.

This is an old Buck Special that the customer had broken the tip off of and then tried to regrind it himself. There were also a few large chips in the edge and many scratches on the blade. I wasn't sure I would be able to make this one work, but it came out looking pretty good. There were a lot of different angles to get right.

This is an old Ka-bar hunting knife that a customer brought to me. The stacked leather handle and the sheath had mildew on them and the sheath leather was dried out. There were also many dents in the pommel and tarnish throughout. A little elbow grease and both the sheath and knife were ready for many more years of service.

This is an old Hubertus hunting knife that had been in a house fire. It had a stag handle that had been ruined and the blade had considerable tarnish and some pitting from the lye of the ashes. I informed the customer that any heat-treat of the blade had surely been lost in the heat of the fire and I would be hard pressed to replicate it, but he only wanted the knife for it's sentimental value and didn't plan to cut anything with it. This knife required a complete restoration: cleaning, polishing and installation of new stag handle slabs, tang pins and lanyard hole. I enjoyed this one a great deal.

A common repair, replacing handle slabs. This particular Wustof Trident chef’s knife has a 16” blade on it (yea, it is a big one) and was used by a pizza maker for cutting pizzas. The slabs had cracked and split and needed to be replaced. The new slabs are straight-grain cocobolo. I was told by a knife purveyor that only 100 of these particular blades were ever made.