Can a chipped knife edge be repaired?

Yes. Small chips grind out on a coarse stone around 400 grit by lowering the edge until the chip is gone, then re-sharpening up through the grits. Deeper chips take longer but are usually fixable on a whetstone, or Knives and Stones can restore the edge for you.

Why Did My Knife Chip or Dull, and How to Fix It

Q: Why did my Japanese knife chip?

Chips usually come from contact with bone, frozen food or hard boards, or from twisting a thin edge sideways. Japanese knives trade some toughness for sharpness, so use a wood or soft-plastic board, cut straight down rather than prying, and keep heavier tasks for a sturdier knife.

Q: Why did my Japanese knife chip or go dull, and how do I fix it?

Chips come from hard contact (bone, frozen food, ceramic, the sink); dulling from normal wear or a bad edge. Grind past the chip on a coarse stone, then resharpen.

What causes chips and rapid dulling on Japanese knives, and how to grind out a chip and restore the edge on a whetstone.

Can my cutting board damage my knife?

Yes. Chips almost always come from hard contact: bone, frozen food, a ceramic plate, or the edge knocking the sink or a glass board. The board is part of that list. Regular synthetic plastic boards are too hard for your sharp Japanese knives, while a soft rubber board is very gentle to the edge and improves edge retention.

In stock on 7 September 2026: Hasegawa Anti-Bacterial Round Cutting Board FKM Series, A$70; Hasegawa Pro-PE Lite Black Anti-Bacterial Cutting Board, from A$130; Hasegawa Wood Core Pro-Soft Lite Rubber Cutting Board, from A$140.

When a new board is not the fix: if the chip came from bone or frozen food, changing boards changes nothing. Grind the edge down on a coarse stone until the chip is gone along the whole edge, then work back up through the grits.

Watch

From the Knives and Stones workshop

Our own sharpening and care tutorials — tap to play.

Restoring a badly sharpened Japanese knife: the cause and the fix. You probably seen one before

0:00Introduction: a badly sharpened knife

0:31The cause and effect

1:35More problems

2:31Potato test before restoration

3:53How to prevent this from happening?

7:02The restoration: reprofiling and thinning

8:13Refinishing and new edge

10:19Potato test after restoration

0:00The profile that went the wrong way

A new knife curves up at the tip, and this one curved down. You have probably seen the same thing on a friend's knife, or on your own: the middle of the blade is flat, and the tip has hooked over.

A knife, when it's new, should have a curved up, and this knife is curved down.
— from the video

1:47Why it happens

The usual cause is sharpening only the part of the blade you actually use. That section dulls first, so it gets sharpened first, and over time it gets sharpened over and over while the rest of the blade is ignored. The profile goes flat, and then the over-sharpened section starts to hook.

7:20The fix

At this point the knife has lost its chef-knife profile, so the fix is a full reprofile: reshape the blade back to a proper curve, then do a major thinning pass to bring the edge down to the cladding line.

So we are cutting the potato, no longer splitting. And this is the combination of reprofiling, thinning, and sharpening.
— from the video

9:11The moment of truth

The whole job took about forty minutes, most of it thinning. A light refinish on 400 grit cleaned up the scratch pattern, then a fresh edge on 1,000 grit. The result: the potato is cut, not split. That is the combination of reprofiling, thinning, and sharpening.

Fixing a Japanese Knife Chip, Cheap as Chips

0:00Shoing the knife

0:49Setting up the Kazfly jig

4:281 to 6 strips of the 100 grit sandpaper

29:35The 200 grit sandpaper

41:27Standard sharpening progression

50:25Test cut

Questions about this

Why did my Japanese knife chip or go dull, and how do I fix it?

Chips almost always come from hard contact: bone, frozen food, a ceramic plate, or the edge knocking the sink or a glass board. Rapid dulling usually means either normal wear or an edge that was sharpened at too steep or inconsistent an angle and never fully refined.

To fix a chip, grind the edge down on a coarse stone until the chip is gone along the whole edge, then work back up through the grits to restore a clean, even bevel. It removes a little steel, but a chipped edge only gets worse if you ignore it.

Our K&S take: a 400 grit stone does the heavy repair, then the 1000 and higher refine. Keep the stone flat with an Atoma plate so the repaired edge stays true.

Reviewed by James Zhang · Last updated 3 June 2026

Details may change without notice. If you spot an error, tell us and we'll fix it.

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