Define Scary sharp

The sharp edge of nothing sharpened to a point.....

 

Mora Clipper..... just the clipper...

I swear every time I handle that knife I cut myself. deep too. can't explain it.. it just happens..

yup Mora Clipper scary sharp!

 

Very sharp. Post of the month.

 

I just posted this in a similiar thread in the general forum. For me, i'm stuck at "really sharp", but it goes something like this…

Dull == doesn’t cut an arm hair or tomato.
Sharp == can shave arm hair or cut a tomato with some downward pressure and sawing
Really Sharp == can whittle a strand of hair under tension, or fall through a tomato with just a slight draw stroke
Scary sharp == can whittle a free standing strand of hair, or falls through a tomato on it’s own with just the blade weight
Holy Crap Sharp == touch and bleed; no pain like getting cut by a shard of glass.

 

I've found holy crap sharp cuts to not bleed very much, if at all, and the really sharp and below cuts to bleed more as dullness increases, at the same time the pain increases.

I've gotten cheap kitchen knives to cut the tops off of my thin arm hair, the edges are usually ruined by misuse or abuse on glass (grrr) plates or "chopping boards".

 

Unholy Crap Sharp == just look at edge and bleed.

 

so sharp it cuts your eyeballs just by looking at it

 

So sharp that it can split an atom in half.

 

I have not been able to get beyond your term of reallysharp. A loose swipe across my arm yields a pile of arm hairs. I do not slice too many tomatoes, but I am sure my knives will. If I can go through double thick cardboard like it was notebook paper, I am sharp enough for me.

 

I define scary sharp as the point where I'm scared to even touch the edge, because it will cut me if I'm not highly focused on what I'm doing. This is usually the same as what some people call "tree topping" (cutting arm hair without touching skin); the level of a properly sharpened straight razor. However, the term "razor sharp" has been misused so much that serious knife aficionados avoid it.

I like to think in terms of hair cutting ability. The first level is obviously arm (not facial) hair shaving. The level above it is hair splitting (cuts hair in half), then hair whittling (cuts hair in 3,4, and so on). Hair whittling is about the same sharpness as tree topping or true razor sharp or "scary sharp". There's probably a level above this, but IMHO it's beyond practical use.

For EDC I sharpen my knife to about hair splitting level, and I will resharpen when it gets below arm hair shaving. This is as sharp as I can get it without stropping.

 

You guys are getting too scientific!

"Scary Sharp" means that it's so sharp that you're a little afraid of your own knife!

You open it more carefully.

You're afraid to drop it in your lap.

You pick up your open knife more carefully.

You do everything more carefully if you don't have health insurance.

.

 

Scary sharp is when it cuts you and you don't notice till the blood runs down your arm.

 

When I first got my CS X2 Voyager (forever ago when I was in high school) I took it outside to chop down some dandelions and ended up accidentally taking off top half of a bee's head. It kept buzzing around for a while until I stepped on the thing to put it out of its misery...felt kind of bad about that. Bee brains are a brownish gray, btw.

I consider both fulloflead's and looker's posts equally valid.