How To Wire Edge Prevention

Great (and fascinating) info. Just the thing to promote OCD.
 
It’s not OCD. It’s CDO! Arranged into alphabetical order as it should be. :p
Interesting article. I’ve had some trouble properly removing the wire edge on s110v in the past, but much like whats stated here, a light pass or two per side with 1.5-1.0 micron diamond with a 2 degree increase can definitely help.
 
To be honest, I didn't look into the wire edge out of curiosity.
I wish I had - before my sharpening service got rejects when a customer could not slice his pizza with a knife that whittled hair. The problem is more common than commonly thought because you cannot see and feel this microburr.

This mother burr, wire edge, or whatever you wish to call this line of mushy metal along the apex can actually be burnished into a very sharp edge that would whittle hair but wouldn't last through one cucumber.

We had to learn how to recognize the wire edge, how to remove, and finally how to prevent it.
In the end we even invented a detector of the wire edge.
So yes, it was COD (Call of Duty), though not without a trait of OCD, but not to the degree of CDO :)
 
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It's a bad idea to simply draw the edge through a wood block, rubber or cork to “rip off” the wire edge.
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Thank You !
That's what I always tell people.

Murry Carter is right on about many things but it drives me crazy to see him not only debur on a hunk of wood end grain but he actually uses the wood holding one of his sharpening stones with all the old grit on the wood. o_O o_O o_O
Nah . . . just nah.
 
I just go through several grits rather than try to jump from one or two rather coarse stones to a strop (wheel or flat doesn't matter to me) they all suck.

Just say NO to crap knife steel.
Sharpen the good stuff on real . . . flat . . . stones and a few of them up through 4,000 Shapton Glass or Shapton Pro 8,000 . . .
For the most part I stay at the same angle for all the grits.
At the most I go one degree perside steeper on problem foily burs.
Good steel and the bur just stays minuscule and comes off on the last stone in the nothingness of fragments.
Done !

Or if one has to sharpen that funny high vanadium stuff (S110V) :) use several diamond stones . . . I go up to 8,000 DMT and again there just is not an issue with the bur it just goes away on it's own.
Done !

Just say NO to crap knife steel.
M4 for ever.
 
bucketstove said:
Hi,
How does this new(?) discovery affect your previously published reports?
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I'd say no how. For mainstream knives the sharpness test itself can tell us whether the edge is burr free. In all those previous studies we looked at comparative sharpness of the edges deburred the same way, not the absolute.
What do you think?
 
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wootzblade wootzblade thanks for sharing that link. I ended spending way too much time reading through the BESS forums. A deep rabbit hole.

With the Sharp Pad no longer available, what other common materials/products would give similar performance for full deburring? Was there something specific about the leather used in that product? I have a similar rough/smooth paddle strop I made from a leather belt. Can I expect similar (or close enough) performance from something like that?
 
wootzblade said:
I'd say no how. For mainstream knives the sharpness test itself can tell us whether the edge is burr free. In all those previous studies we looked at comparative sharpness of the edges deburred the same way, not the absolute.
What do you think?
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Hi,
yes that makes sense, comparative sharpness wouldn't be affected
 
Another thought re Murray Carter - is possible he uses his wood drag more to verify lack of burr rather than to actually deburr. Myself, I've had good luck with dragging through wood for deburring but only if it is done repeatedly, interspersed with a number of passes on an abrasive - not so much with one or two passes at the finish. This isn't my usual, but has worked reliably when I've used it.

FWIW I don't believe this wire edge is terribly common, at least not to the extent it is noticeable with most sharpenings. I suspect far more common to trailing edge sharpening on harder surfaces.
 
wootzblade wootzblade It's probably clearly stated somewhere in the article, but my scatter brain isn't allowing me to see it... just to be clear, are you only using edge trailing at a slightly higher angle to clean the wire edge off of the apex or edge leading? would either direction work the same if done "perfectly"?
 
I'm pretty sure he is stropping with the idea to focus and clean up a weakened small area of the edge where the burr broke off from. So that only leaves one viable direction. Is that it wootz?
 
HeavyHanded said:
Another thought re Murray Carter - is possible he uses his wood drag more to verify lack of burr rather than to actually deburr. Myself, I've had good luck with dragging through wood for deburring but only if it is done repeatedly, interspersed with a number of passes on an abrasive - not so much with one or two passes at the finish. This isn't my usual, but has worked reliably when I've used it.

FWIW I don't believe this wire edge is terribly common, at least not to the extent it is noticeable with most sharpenings. I suspect far more common to trailing edge sharpening on harder surfaces.
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That's true, I should have said "common to edge-trailing honing".
For deburring we use powered honing in our workshop, it is edge-trailing - and this is the study focus.

CasePeanut - leather removes the base burr, though not as well as the flint/rock-hard felt; a Korean sharpener wrote to me that he uses suede in the final step of higher-angle deburring for the wire edge prevention, and the suede works better for that than the plain leather. I am yet to try the suede myself.

LipRipper - I have not experimented on edge-leading deburring, and cannot compare it to edge-trailing.
But as Sergeua has noted, for the ultimate sharpness edge-trailing honing is the only option. If you goal is not a true razor sharp edge, you can deburr edge-leading.
 
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I tried a number of methods for higher volume work, but ultimately settled on using a hard stone for the final honing, and a belt to reset the bevel.
 
wootzblade said:
That's true, I should have said "common to edge-trailing honing".
For deburring we use powered honing in our workshop, it is edge-trailing - and this is the study focus.

CasePeanut - leather removes the base burr, though not as well as the flint/rock-hard felt; a Korean sharpener wrote to me that he uses suede in the final step of higher-angle deburring for the wire edge prevention, and the suede works better for that than the plain leather. I am yet to try the suede myself.

LipRipper - I have not experimented on edge-leading deburring, and cannot compare it to edge-trailing.
But as Sergeua has noted, for the ultimate sharpness edge-trailing honing is the only option. If you goal is not a true razor sharp or sharper than razor edge, you can deburr edge-leading.
Click to expand...

Thanks wootzblade wootzblade - Would wire edge removal improve with adding Boron Carbide to the rock hard felt or is plain better?
 
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