Knit for Brains dot Net

You may remember I bought some cheap knitting needles from China and was going to send them back. About half of them were so dull I literally could not knit with them. Well, I kept dragging my feet, not wanting to spend about 20.00 USD to send them back, wondering if they would really be refunded as promised, and finally decided to just try and sharpen the dull ones.

It turned out to be really easy to sharpen them with a sanding disk on my drill, the polish and buff the tips with fine steel wool. Now they are exactly as sharp as I prefer my needles, which is sharper than even good bamboo needles come, and I am happily knitting away at a knitting needle case with a pair of them.

If you do this – many a handy guy will be tempted – I just used the standard sanding disk that came with the disk for my hand drill. I kept the needle at a sharp angle, almost parallel with the surface, and made sure the new tip had the proper taper of about an inch. When it was right, I refined the tip on a piece of sandpaper held in my hand. Then I buffed the sanded taper with 00 steel wool and finally polished it with 0000 extra fine steel wool.

I don’t think a pencil sharpener will work for this as they are meant for soft pine wood and bamboo is hard. Power tools to the rescue!

UPDATE: After some use I found that the tips still had remnant groves from the sanding with the disk, and so the steel wool was not enough to smooth them out. So I took some 138 grit sandpaper and twisted the tips in that for a bit and found it smoothed them out great. I had to readjust the tips again as they got sharper in this process, but it shows you can sharpen and dull up your bamboo tips as you need.