Ever seen anybody use a robot for sharpening?

Nathan the Machinist

Nathan the Machinist

KnifeMaker / Machinist / Evil Genius
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I haven't, but I was wondering if anybody here has ever seen anybody in industry with common repeat patterns use a robotic arm to sharpen? They're pretty easy to "teach". I was thinking this might be a way to reduce variation and robots go cheap at auction.

Anybody here ever heard of someone doing this or use or setup robots? Do you think this would be feasible?
 
Either Wustoff or Henckel (sp?) does. Robotic arms are getting to be readily available, I think we will be seeing this in smaller shops soon. There is not a whole lot to making them either.
 
Keith Nix said:
I'm thinking on building Nathan's parallelogram knife sharpener. He's moved on to robots!
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The parallelogram isn't going away, but I'd like to augment it with an area set up to sharpen whatever specific pattern we have in production at the moment in a more efficient manner. The parallelogram isn't "easy", it takes skill to get good results, it simply constrains your edge to a specific angle, you still have to drive. After thousands and thousands of blades I'd be lost without it, but it's certainly not foolproof or "fun".

Sharpening is boring and (done well) highly skilled, <--- not a great combination. If I could automate even just 50% of our sharpening it would help a lot. And these robots are getting really inexpensive, if they could do the job. Even if a person had to baby sit it and say "take another couple passes, it's not at a burr yet" it would beat having to maintain careful focus to achieve a "robotic" level of perfection doing it manually. If it would work.
 
I have thought about using a robotic arm to heat treat blades. Be a vertical oven and knives on hooks. Grab a knife and drop it in the oven, soak, lift out and swing over to quench tank and dunk. Guess it would be more like a wheel with multiple positions but we will call it robot arm lol.
 
JTknives said:
I have thought about using a robotic arm to heat treat blades. Be a vertical oven and knives on hooks. Grab a knife and drop it in the oven, soak, lift out and swing over to quench tank and dunk. Guess it would be more like a wheel with multiple positions but we will call it robot arm lol.
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A conveyer belt furnace basically accomplishes the same thing. The knives drop into the quench tank at the end.
 
I like how you’re thinking Nathan. Not blowing smoke here, but be careful about changing something that works too. The bevels and edges you’re producing are fantastic. It’s almost disturbing how many knives I’ve bought that just aren’t very sharp from the maker. My CPKs have all been really good, and even better lately.

I’ve sampled a fair amount of Spyderco knives. The edge bevels are pretty consistent, but not perfect like you might think a robot would achieve. They’ve been measured by laser and shown to be off by several dps, one side vs the other. Some folks have complained about wonky bevels, where they’re noticeably wider at the tip on one side. Stuff like that.
 
Larrin said:
A conveyer belt furnace basically accomplishes the same thing. The knives drop into the quench tank at the end.
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Yeah I had been looking at those as well and thy are not to badly priced. Used it looks like around 5k$ but then there is the install. And god forbid that linked belt ever needs to be replaced lol.
 
mb> said:
I like how you’re thinking Nathan. Not blowing smoke here, but be careful about changing something that works too. The bevels and edges you’re producing are fantastic. It’s almost disturbing how many knives I’ve bought that just aren’t very sharp from the maker. My CPKs have all been really good, and even better lately.

I’ve sampled a fair amount of Spyderco knives. The edge bevels are pretty consistent, but not perfect like you might think a robot would achieve. They’ve been measured by laser and shown to be off by several dps, one side vs the other. Some folks have complained about wonky bevels, where they’re noticeably wider at the tip on one side. Stuff like that.
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If anyone is curious, the way I currently sharpen is a parallelogram hanging from the ceiling that constrains the angle. my thinking is a robot can also constrain the angle the same way and apply pressure and feed rates in a predictable repeatable manner. looking at the Spyderco setup, it looks like they're sharpening against a wheel which is going to give you a lot more variation in angle than setting a platen to the angle.
 
mb> said:
I’ve sampled a fair amount of Spyderco knives. The edge bevels are pretty consistent, but not perfect like you might think a robot would achieve. They’ve been measured by laser and shown to be off by several dps, one side vs the other. Some folks have complained about wonky bevels, where they’re noticeably wider at the tip on one side. Stuff like that.
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Are you sure these are the robot-sharpened knives? I think they're only doing that on Golden models, and not necessarily all of them, and it is pretty new iirc. ETA - Well the video was from 2015, so I guess they've been doing it awhile. Pretty sure it's not all models though.
 
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SpyderPhreak said:
Are you sure these are the robot-sharpened knives? I think they're only doing that on Golden models, and not necessarily all of them, and it is pretty new iirc. ETA - Well the video was from 2015, so I guess they've been doing it awhile. Pretty sure it's not all models though.
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Yes, I’m referring to a Golden, robot sharpened blade here. I don’t think all their plants use that system.

I don’t think the angle thing is that big of a deal. Just noting for the sake of discussion that one might think robotic work and perfection would be closely aligned. That’s not necessarily the case. But like Nathan noted above, maybe it’s the process and not the robot.
 
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