You can go ages without it happening, but eventually one of your knives will lose its tip. Whether it’s during dinner service and someone (definitely wasn’t you…) knocks it on the floor, or mysteriously you come back to your station from grabbing a coffee and no one knows what happened, but your beloved knife is missing its tip.
From what I have noticed, you really only see one school of thought on tip repair: just grind the bevel up to meet the spine of the knife. This seems to be how most sharpeners do it, and while it does give you back a pointed tip, it severely increases the belly of your knife.
Depending on how much of your tip is missing, there are two alternative methods to repairing your blade. The first method works best if only 1 cm or less has broken off. Simply grind down the spine to meet the existing bevel. The best part about doing it this way is you don’t alter the cutting edge of the blade in any way. The second method is if there has been well over 1 cm of material broken off. In this case you need to meet in the middle, grinding the spine down and the bevel up.
Repairing your broken tip using one of these alternate methods has the advantage of keeping the blade profile as close to the original as possible. This means the knife will perform and feel much like it did before. Do your clients a favour and repair their broken tip in this manner. When it comes to doing finer work that requires the tip of their knife, they will notice the difference and be grateful for it!
You don’t need any fancy equipment to do this but I would recommend using 60 grit sandpaper adhered to a flat stable surface instead of your waterstone. I use much the same motions as when sharpening except I gradually increase the angle to 90 degrees as I’m shaping to create a square edged spine.
