Come 1, Come all, to our first forums Whackoff

Well Im in. Sounds like a pretty good idea. Hopefully we'll get eough people. Just figure out when you want to do this and I'll work on getting that cord.
Kevin
 
How does this sound?

When: Sunday Afternoon (Oct. 22th), submit
results by 3:00 PM Eastern
Which: Would like to get as many responses
as we can on the Buck 110 folding
hunter.
How: I will open up a thread in the Blade
discussion forum at 3:00PM where we
can all share our results.

 
Hey not2sharp- If this is a genuine whackoff should'nt you change your topic heading from:
"Come 1, come all" to "Cum 1, cum all" ??

Donald
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Catchy title isn't it? I Would rather leave it to each member to draw their own interpretation. Did I say "member"?!
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Let's try to keep it focused on knives.
 
A couple of points :

The ability to cut depends on two major factors. The first is the sharpness of the knife. This you have covered, just get everyone to sharpen their blades before hand and be specific about what finish is used. You can all try to get the same or different finish which could give some really interesting results.

The second aspect is the amount of pressure that the individual can exert - this will vary quite a bit across the people. However with a large enough sample the central numbers should give a stable result.

You can also get around the second problem by removing the vagueness of the end criteria. Simply put a scale under the cutting board and stop when the force during the slice exceeds a certain amount, say 100 lbs or whatever you feel is sensible.

Note that blunting is not linear so the amount of cuts it takes to blunt to 75% is far less than what is needed to reduce it again to 50% so don't pick too high a weight or you will need a lot of rope. You can if you want investigate the blunting rates by doing 10 cuts, estimating the weight, and repeating.

You should also if at all possible get the tests by the individuals to be repeated a few times. This will allow some check on how reliable they are. It also reduces the possibly of very off data points due to improper sharpening etc. . If you are together then don't discuss the results and swap blades around from trial to trial.

Depending on the spread of the results I would not blindly go with a simple average. Because of the very likely possible of a heavy tailed distribution,
a more robust estimate might be better such as the median or absolute deviation based statistics.

-Cliff
 
Cliff,

Its good to hear from you.

My original tought was to ask the folks to email both of us the results and we could tally them up and post them on a follow-up thread. If we can count you in, then perhaps that would be the best way to go as it may reduce some of the bias.

Regarding the amount of pressure used to effect the cut. I have given this a bit of tought and have concluded that if we are to perform the test, with any level of participation, the mechanics of the test must be simple and must rely on readily available materials. My recommendation that we use a telephone book as a platform on which to perform the cutting address two issues:

1) The amount of wear do to contact with the cutting surface would be roughly equivalent. I would go out on a limb and argue that most of us will have access to a telephone book, and that most telephone books are printed on similar paper.

2) The telephone books also offer a certain level compression. This should reduce the tendency to rely on excessive force.

If its not quite a fully controlled environment, at least it is a little closer.

Let me know if you are open to the email strategy.
 
not2sharp:


If we can count you in
Click to expand...

I don't have a the test knife, but would be glad to help in the data interpretation, email away.

If its not quite a fully controlled environment, at least it is a little closer.
Click to expand...

I would not get too hung up on the level of precision. I think Steve Harvey put it best when he noted quite awhile ago that if a difference is so small that you have to do a very controlled test to see it, the difference will not be meaningful for general use as you will never notice it.

I think that a bunch of people with some rope (or whatever) should easily be able to generate some quantitative comparisons between knives. There will be of course variation due to method and individual, but this is to be expected and is of course valuable as the spread of the data can help the reader determine if the performance difference is actually meaningful to them.

Some visual representations of the data would be valuable along with some measures of central tendancy like probably the median and its "standard error".

-Cliff
 
Thanks Cliff,

Here is my email address:

Ebarrio630@aol.com

If you can add yours here we would ask everyone to copy both of us on their results.

I'll tally up whatever raw data I have (try to send it to me by 3:00PM) and post it on a new thread on Sunday afternoon (I'll try by 5:00PM). Cliff, if you think we have enough to pull up a distribution curve then please add your results to my tally.
 
DAMN ...... I wish I could participate in this!
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“Belül szívem hibád az örökkévaló erõs vastartalmú sok vasaló és orvosság."


Crushing the weak since 1970 .... the Demon has spoken.
 
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