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

Figs. 23-24. The blade of Fig. 25 was sharpened on the 6000 grit waterstone using thesame technique as that of the Fig. 23 blade, the only difference being that the controlblade of Fig. 25 was ground on 600 grit Tru Hone wheels compared to the 1000 gritwheels for the Fig. 23 blade. The original bur on the as-ground 600 grit blade of Fig. 25would have been considerably larger than that of the 1000 grit blade of Fig. 23. CompareFigs. 11 and 12 to estimate the difference of the as-ground bur width and edgestraightness. Comparing Figs. 23 and 25 one sees that the 6000 grit waterstone hasproduced edges that are quite similar for both as-ground starting conditions.The effect of loading the leather strop with the chrome oxide compound prior tostropping is shown by comparing Figs. 24 and 26. The chrome oxide abrasive used onthe blade of Fig. 26 has produced a dramatic reduction in the size of the remnant abrasivegrooves on the face of the blade. As shown in the edge view of Fig. 26 the bur width ison the order of 0.4 to 0.5 microns. Comparing edge width and edge straightness to that ofthe razor blade standards of Figs 7 and 8, one sees that the quality of the Fig 26 edge isclose to these standards. (As will be shown in the next section, however, sharpening a blade with the2β edge angle of the razor blades, 17 o , is more difficult than a blade with the 2β edge angle of 40 o .)As discussed above, it was initially thought that a clean strop would contain21