Experiments on Knife Sharpening John D. Verhoeven ... - BushcraftUK

ledges of material has broken out of the edge. Reducing the number of b&f passes to 2dramatically reduced both the density of such ledge break-out regions along the edge aswell as the size of the ledge regions. In both of the face views presented in Fig. 16 thereis no ledge breakout, and the edge straightness is very good, however, no better than inthe original control blade, compare to Fig. 12. The Edge view of Fig. 16 shows a regionat the lower right where breakout has occurred. In regions where no breakout occurs,such as the upper left of Fig. 16, the edge width runs around 1.5 microns, which is at thehigh end of that observed on the control blades prior to steeling. The blades examinedafter 5 b&f passes presented results intermediate to those of the 15 and 2 b&f passes, butcloser to those of the 2 b&f passes. In summary, the effect of the number of passes wasfairly clear, the lowest number of passes studied, 2 b&f passes, produced the best edges.However, even in this case no improvement was found over the control 1000 grit bladesof Fig. 12, and some detrimental effect was found from occasional breakout, as illustratedhere with the Edge view of Fig. 16.13