Wear resistance & Edge Holding?

[Gator97]

Hi All,
I understand that Wear Resistance doesn't equal edge holding. In other words, if a blade material X has very high wear resistance that doesn't necessasrily mean it will hold an edge as good. In short my understanding is that the good edge holding capability comes as a summary of many factors. Would be very interesting to know what are these? Hardness, alloy grain size, blade geometry, edge grind? Something else?

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zvis.com
Have Fun,
Alligator

[This message has been edited by Gator97 (edited 06-24-2000).]

 

Hi Gator, check your mailbox
Happy sharpening

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D.T. UTZINGER

 

[Cliff Stamp]

Steel properties : strength, impact toughness and ductility. These provide resistance to rolling and chipping.

Blade properties : cutting ability and handle ergonomics and security. The more controlled your cut and the lower the number of cuts you need to do a given amount of work the less damage an edge will take.

-Cliff

 

[e_utopia]

Um, I think that's a bit of a generalization. The very reason that knife design is such an art is that the actual physical properties used to describe how a steel (or non-steel) blade acts are very many, and very complex. In addition to the properties which you failed to mention, even such a simple property as "strength" is actually several properties, all of which act in different ways. To further complicate matters, the properties vary within a knife blades as functions of the manufacturing process of the steel, the working of the steel (forging or stock-removal), the heat-treat (even without differential-tempering), the wear the knife has experienced up to the point at which you're interested in mapping the performance of the knife, the general chaotic nature of the universe, etc. Personally, I would never even attempt to try and do the calculations for even one cut, even if I had a supercomputer to play with.

To Gator's question: wear resistance does pretty accurately equal edge-holding if all your cuts are nearly perfect. As soon as you stress the blade sideways, the world of edge-rolling (and edge-chipping, and blade flexing, and blade fracturing, etc., etc., etc.) comes into play. If you do nothing but open envelopes, you're safe thinking of wear resistance as edge holding and vice-versa (opening envelopes is a great use for ceramic knives, as they resist wear better than any steel I'm aware of, but do not posess the other properties which become necessary when you start to use the knife a little harder).

--JB

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e_utopia@hotmail.com

[This message has been edited by e_utopia (edited 06-25-2000).]