Sterling Silver Knife Handle
Repair & Restoration
Sterling Silver handles can be repaired
Do not put your sterling silver knives in the dishwasher. The knives are usually set with pitch in the handles. When the knife handles get hot from the extended wash in hot water, combined with the heated dry cycle, it causes the pitch to expand and split the knife handles. The split knife handles can also happen with too much pressure during cutting.
Split Knife Handle Repair
These sterling silver dinner knife handles arrived with the handles split in half.
Unfortunately, someone had filled the knife handles with epoxy in a misguided effort to reset the knives into the handles. When the handle got to hot the air inside expanded and split the knife handle along the seam.
First lesson: Do not use epoxy to set knives into the handles. Now the handles are damaged, and I can not remove the knife blades.
Here are the knife handles being repaired.
I had to cut the knife handle along the entire length of the handle until it came apart in two halves. This is how the knife handles are farbricated originally, but cutting them apart when they are filled with epoxy was very difficult. Below you can see the knife handles cut in half, cleaned up, and ready to solder back together. This photo below represents hours and hours of work.
There is no way to remove epoxy, cement, or concrete from sterling silver handles.
This image above shows the knife handles ready to reassemble. The final result (below) shows the original old steel knives reset in the sterling silver dinner knife handles along with the customer’s carving knife with the carving knife blade reset.
