Cliff Stamp
BANNED
- Joined
- Oct 5, 1998
- Messages
- 17,562
Singularity :
Essentially yes. There is a large difference between posts of the type "I fully endorse this knife" and posts which comment on aspects of knife performance. If you are just exploring knife performance you can be very narrow in focus and still give useful information. You can use a knife for one task and then make informative comments in that regard, but this usually isn't usually going to make for a very strong "review" of the knife as it could ignore critical aspects.
Well yes, but isn't this true of everything. All performance aspects are connected to negative attributes, make an edge more obtuse and it gets more durable, make it more acute and it cuts better. So you just state where the performance falls, give some references to other blades for comparison and let the reader decide what is good enough for them.
Yes, for example knife performance is generally very weakly correlated to price. However wear resistance is highly correlated to carbide content and more specifically, if Vanadium is present it pretty much swamps out everything else to the extent that wear resistance is proportional to its percentage. Slicing ability is highly correlated to push cutting ability as they both share a common dependence on blade geometry. You change a blades ability to push cut by altering the geometry and the slicing ability goes up (or down) in the same manner simply because all slicing contains push cutting (the material gets wedged apart in both cases). The change in load will be slightly lower for slicing though because there is less side wedging with slicing becuase it isn't a direct compression because of the shearing effect, the percentage reduction in load is probably more directly correlated on a 1:1 basis.
I am not quite sure what you mean here. The understanding of correlation comes from doing the specific testing and then normal use. If you do some test and find that it doesn't correlate to any regular blade use then you stop doing it as it isn't useful except for curiosity sake.
[rope cutting machine]
I don't see the distinction there. Yes there are other properties that influence cutting ability, (blade and handle geometry for example), but nothing except the edge condition is changing during the cutting, so how isn't it simply a matter of edge retention?
Cut something in a way that can be quantified and which doesn't strongly depend on the blade geometry. I currently push cut baisting thread and measure the amount of force required, and slice 1/4" poly under a 1000 g load and measure the edge length required. Hemp is better to use than the poly, I continue to use it just because I bought a lot of it awhile ago before I figured this out. There are lots of other ways. Don't totally discount the ability to go by feel though, with enough experience you can tell apart very small differences in sharpness.
-Cliff
Essentially yes. There is a large difference between posts of the type "I fully endorse this knife" and posts which comment on aspects of knife performance. If you are just exploring knife performance you can be very narrow in focus and still give useful information. You can use a knife for one task and then make informative comments in that regard, but this usually isn't usually going to make for a very strong "review" of the knife as it could ignore critical aspects.
Well yes, but isn't this true of everything. All performance aspects are connected to negative attributes, make an edge more obtuse and it gets more durable, make it more acute and it cuts better. So you just state where the performance falls, give some references to other blades for comparison and let the reader decide what is good enough for them.
Yes, for example knife performance is generally very weakly correlated to price. However wear resistance is highly correlated to carbide content and more specifically, if Vanadium is present it pretty much swamps out everything else to the extent that wear resistance is proportional to its percentage. Slicing ability is highly correlated to push cutting ability as they both share a common dependence on blade geometry. You change a blades ability to push cut by altering the geometry and the slicing ability goes up (or down) in the same manner simply because all slicing contains push cutting (the material gets wedged apart in both cases). The change in load will be slightly lower for slicing though because there is less side wedging with slicing becuase it isn't a direct compression because of the shearing effect, the percentage reduction in load is probably more directly correlated on a 1:1 basis.
I am not quite sure what you mean here. The understanding of correlation comes from doing the specific testing and then normal use. If you do some test and find that it doesn't correlate to any regular blade use then you stop doing it as it isn't useful except for curiosity sake.
[rope cutting machine]
I don't see the distinction there. Yes there are other properties that influence cutting ability, (blade and handle geometry for example), but nothing except the edge condition is changing during the cutting, so how isn't it simply a matter of edge retention?
Cut something in a way that can be quantified and which doesn't strongly depend on the blade geometry. I currently push cut baisting thread and measure the amount of force required, and slice 1/4" poly under a 1000 g load and measure the edge length required. Hemp is better to use than the poly, I continue to use it just because I bought a lot of it awhile ago before I figured this out. There are lots of other ways. Don't totally discount the ability to go by feel though, with enough experience you can tell apart very small differences in sharpness.
-Cliff