Sharpness tester

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I guess thats what got my attention in sharpening (and bowlingball repairs/polishing = grinding and gritt stuff): the basics seem so little, the plan is so clear. But the longer you practise it, the more you discover.

Easy to learn, hard to master
 
i feel its time for you kawa to sharpen up some knives as good as you can and test them. around 100 on that meter should be possible.
 
inferno said:
i feel its time for you kawa to sharpen up some knives as good as you can and test them. around 100 on that meter should be possible.
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End of december I have 2 weeks off, then I will take my personal good knives to the stones again. Can't wait.

Yesterday I received this knife for my brother in law who has his birthday in the beginning of december:

https://www.meesterslijpers.nl/tadafusa-s-44-koksmes-hamerslag-21cm?search=tadafusa
I was impressed by the sharpness OOTB, never felt or seen such a keen edge before. It is higly polished, but has so much teeth to it when i drag my nail. It almost has a zero bevel (both sides) with a small microbevel, barely visible (you can see it in the link, the choil picture is the same in real life)
It hit 175 on average after 3 measurements...


I don't think I can achieve anything near 100 yet, but you just gave me a long term goal :cool:
 
Being a gadget man, getting one of these testers is tempting. On the other hand, it would be for amusement value more than anything.

When I sharpen my knives, I stop when the edge is "bloody sharp". I don't know where that falls on the BESS scale, but it's sharp enough to shave, and definitely sharp enough for cooking.

But, if you want to pull the trigger, sharpeningsupplies.com currently have a Black Friday Special for the Edge On Up testers.

Just saying'… ;)
 
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Michi said:
Being a gadget man, getting one of these testers is tempting. On the other hand, it would be for amusement value more than anything.

When I sharpen my knives, I stop when the edge is "bloody sharp". I don't know where that falls on the BESS scale, but it's sharp enough to shave, and definitely sharp enough for cooking.

But, if you want to pull the trigger, sharpeningsupplies.com currently have a Black Friday Special for the Edge On Up testers.

Just saying'… ;)
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Exactly that!

I call my knives sharp after sharpening, u do the same. Probably your knives are way sharper then mine, but I (and I think this goes for most people) don't have anyone in the neighborhood the compare/check where your really stand. Not that it is a competition, but to know if you can (and how much) improve yourself, you first have to know how sharp your sharp really is...
This thing is kinda universal language.


Not to convince you to buy ;) but I allready found (measured) out that my stropping on leather with red rouge (iron oxide) is not a placebo.
I deburred the best that i can on a shapton pro 2000, meaning till the point Im convinced I dont feel any burr anymore.
Then I measured 3 times.
After stropping the average went down by 80 over 3 measurements.
Ofcourse I know from newspaper test that stropping made my knife slicker and that might be enough to not buy this thing. But if you want to know, you have to know :cool:

Im curious about the results when i overstrop (rounding off the edge). I know when i f#ck up I loose all the grab on my fingernail.
Haven't dared to overstrop on purpose yet, will happen soon by accident anyway 🤡


It's too soon to buy yourself a Christmass present, but you are allowed to buy yourself a Sinterklaas cadeautje! :proost: (why are these Dutch memes available on this international forum ;) )
 
Kawa said:
It's too soon to buy yourself a Christmass present, but you are allowed to buy yourself a Sinterklaas cadeautje!
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In Germany, Sankt Nikolaus is 6th December, so that just about works out ;)

But I just bought myself a PID controller for my smoker, so the sharpness tester will have to take a back seat for a while.
 
I get a sharpness tester delivered for free in my mailbox every other week. It's called 'the local newspaper'. Works for stropping too.
It's the only reason I haven't put a sticker on my mailbox against unaddressed spam...
 
Yes that does the job also.

But its harder to tell by newspaper which of your 3 very very very sharp knives is sharper, or
did you actually get the same knife as sharp as you did the last time you did that knife.

Do you need to know? no
If you want to know, newspaper wont do that for you

Its subjective vs objective, as far as you can get objective
 
At the point where I'm unable to distinguish the sharpness with a newspaper I'd also consider that to be the point where further sharpening doesn't really bring a whole lot for a kitchen knife. If it's good enough to shave, it's good enough to sever protein and cellulose for me...

There's also a few different ways you can test on newspaper that are easier or more difficult for an edge. But in the end it's debatable how useful any of that is. What's more useful to know is how well it actually cuts what you intend to cut with it. Can you cut onions without crying for example? Can you cut apples and leave them alone without turning brown?
Then there's the whole issue that cutting performance is often more related to what's behind the edge than the edge itself. The finest edge in the world still isn't gonna cut a carrot for crap if it has thick shoulders behind it, just like a mediocre edge can still actually rip through carrots fairly well as long as it's thin enough behind it.

One of the biggest revelations to me was when i finally realized I should be spending more time thinning and less time chasing 'perfect edges'. Well unless you do actually want to shave with it of course.
 
100% agree with what youre saying.

but.. ;)

The sharpness tester only tells you how sharp your edge is on that point, nothing more. No edge retention, not if its a laser or thick knife, not it it is teethy enough for peppers. So if you want to judge on those aspects after sharpening, we shouldn't even talk about this sharpness tester.

This thing doesnt say 'well, you reached this and this number, now you can cut unions or carrots the way you want'
So it might be that one knife with a score of 100 is very good in cutting carrots, but the other with score 100 does a bad job. It only tells me something about how my edge finish is compared to ---the last time i did this same knife/ other people using the same tester---

Dont use or 'criticize' (or not really doing that) it for things its not intended for,

Next to that, lets not forget that most of you here are way beyond a level that you need, or will benefit from, or take joy out of using a sharpness tester to see how well you did. I bet you dont even need newspaper to test: you probably know when you did a good job. If I see little videos of kippington dulling a knife and within 40 seconds he moves through 3 gritts and has the knife razor sharp again... Dont tell me he still needs newspaper or dragging his nail to confirm he is done :cool:


A few around here (including me) are still lesser gods ;) We are glad when our last knife is being sharpened better then the knife we did before that, which shows improvement.
 
If I speak for myself I wouldn't consider myself an expert. Just stuck around here long enough to learn a thing or two from people who do have a clue and applied it enough to realize that what they said made sense. Now I just parrot it so they don't have to type it 38 more times. ;)
But at some point I reached a level where, at least for me, investing a whole lot more time / effort / resources into it just wasn't bringing me much anymore. The results I achieved sufficed for the intended use. Beyond that I was basically wasting time, or even making things worse (overpolishing is a thing, and can reduce edge retention).

What I normally use is just feeling the burr to know when I reached apex, then Murray Carter's 4-finger sharpness test (just google it, its very simple and surprisingly effective) to get a feel for how sharp something is while sharpening, and then newspaper test to make sure. I think my own most common mistake early on was moving up in grits too soon. If it's not sharp after your mid grit stone, you're not gonna rub it to sharpness on a polishing stone.

Also, don't forget about the fact that some steel types are simply a lot easier / faster to sharpen than others. It's what makes learning / practising on softer stainless so problematic, and it's one of the main reasons so many people swear by carbon knives. Easier to get results, easier to learn with in my opinion.
 
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