Cliff Stamp
BANNED
- Joined
- Oct 5, 1998
- Messages
- 17,562
Recently there has been some discussion of hair whittling as a sign of sharpness. This is essentially taking a strand of hair and carving it like you would a piece of wood to make shavings.
I did some work last night to see how demanding this is in terms of sharpness and more specifically edge angle. In short I found that at about 75% of optimal sharpness, with an edge of ~15 degrees per side this is fairly easy to do :
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/misc/hair_whittling.jpg
At this level of sharpness the knife is catching on hair above the skin if you try to shave with it, but not quite popping it off yet. It will also push right down into a piece of newsprint with no draw.
As you reduce the edge angle and raise the sharpness it gets easier still and you can split the hair into more than two pieces and work on finer strands.
The vast majority of Spyderco's I have handled could do this NIB, most are actually way sharper, as are some customs like Dozier.
All you do it make the initial cut and just pull the blade through the hair, it tends to split fairly easy. The hard part is getting the angle right so you don't cut out.
If you draw the blade on a slice you can do it with duller and thicker edges. The above numbers were for push cuts.
-Cliff
I did some work last night to see how demanding this is in terms of sharpness and more specifically edge angle. In short I found that at about 75% of optimal sharpness, with an edge of ~15 degrees per side this is fairly easy to do :
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/misc/hair_whittling.jpg
At this level of sharpness the knife is catching on hair above the skin if you try to shave with it, but not quite popping it off yet. It will also push right down into a piece of newsprint with no draw.
As you reduce the edge angle and raise the sharpness it gets easier still and you can split the hair into more than two pieces and work on finer strands.
The vast majority of Spyderco's I have handled could do this NIB, most are actually way sharper, as are some customs like Dozier.
All you do it make the initial cut and just pull the blade through the hair, it tends to split fairly easy. The hard part is getting the angle right so you don't cut out.
If you draw the blade on a slice you can do it with duller and thicker edges. The above numbers were for push cuts.
-Cliff
