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

the 2β target hone angle set to around 5 to 6 o larger than the as-ground 2β angle of theblades. The leather honing was done with very light pressure. The blades were passedback-and-forth across the wheel at a slow rate of around 1 inch per second. A total of 4to 6 back-and-forth passes were made on alternate sides of the blades. <strong>Experiments</strong> withincreased pressure did not produce significant changes. Figures 32 and 33 present SEMmicrographs of the blades of Figs. 30 and 31 after the honing treatment. Increasing thenumber of back and forth passes to 10 to 12 did not produce significant changes.Figures 32 and 33 illustrate that honing on the chrome oxide loaded leather stropproduces edges of excellent quality on blades as-ground on both the 220 grit and thewaterstone wheels. In both cases the face smoothness is excellent and the edgeroughness and straightness seen in the face views are also very good. It does appear thatthe edge width of the blades ground with the 220 grit wheel, Fig. 32, is a bit larger thanthat of the blade ground on the waterstone, Fig. 33. Figure 33 includes a blowup of theedge at a magnification of 10,000x, superimposed on the edge view. As shown, the edgewidth is on the order of 0.35 microns. (Note: On sharp edges, the secondary electrons that form27