A freshly sharpened edge with a micro chip? Do you honestly believe I would let that happen?
You can SEE the abrasive path all the way to the chip. Also, as I stated these liter the edge from front to back. There is simply no way I could add a scale in with the picture using this microscope unless the picture is solely of the ruler. The focal distance between the ruler and edge would be too much.
Jason, sorry, I should have used the term "micro-chip" only as a description of the missing portion of the apex and not as a suggestion as to what had caused it.
Also, I meant if you could take a picture of just the mm scale of a ruler by itself as that is helpful for determining the magnification power of the microscope, for example:
This image shows that my USB microscope captures about ~2.2mm across the frame and thus a ~2200 micron length of edge in 1600 pixels, meaning each pixel represents about ~1.375 microns.
Now, I suggested it was probably not related to carbide tear out using the following reasoning, and if I am overlooking something in this reasoning please let me know.
Firstly, from the way the scratch patterns look in the images you posted I am guessing the magnification power of your microscope is at least in the same ballpark as the one I am using. I cannot know that for sure unless you post an image of the MM scale of a ruler like the above one I posted. Still, based on the assumption that your USB microscope has roughly similar magnification power, each pixel in an image taken with it would represent about 1.4 microns.
Now if you look at this zoomed in image of the micro-chip, you will see I have added a pixel scale to the image that shows the micro-chip is ~23 pixels wide and ~15 pixels deep. On my microscope this would translate to approximately ~30 microns wide and ~20 microns deep, which is ~10 times the scale of the ~2-5 micron sized carbides we are talking about. This is why I thought it may not be related to carbide tear out, because the scale is totally different.
Now, it may be the case that 10V forms carbide aggregates that large, and it may be the case that the image you posted is therefore showing carbide tear out, but I can say that I have not observed anything like that image at any point with my Maxamet Mule either before or even after any of the tests I posted videos of. Thus, even if it is evidence of carbide tear out (which it may be), it appears not to have occurred at all in Maxamet.
I also think you are focusing on the edge apex strength too much. The steel will stay the same all the time, edge geometry and steel hardness will be the main contributing factors in edge strength, not what grit it was sharpened to or by what kind of abrasive.
The emphasis on apex strength came directly from proponents of the theory that you shouldn't use AlOx or SiC abrasives on high hardness, high vanadium steels. I also tested initial sharpness and high-sharpness edge retention, and didn't find any noticeable difference on those measures either. I'm not sure what other aspect of apex performance there would be to test to check for the presence of negative consequences from using AlOx or SiC on Maxamet?
