05-09-2018, 03:30 PM
Very well thought through and expressed Mark and thank you as well for opening Edge Retention/Rolling part II with your thoughts. The thrust of these experiments is to increase understanding and to reduce speculation. Conventional wisdom can be both the foundation of an industry as well as its adversary. Only thoughtful experimentation can advance a process. There could be a little blind luck involved, like accidently spilling your rubber mixture on a hot stove top, but lots of experimentation followed that famous accident. This is how scientists came to understand the vulcanizing process.
Sharpening and then heat-treating wouldn't seem to be a viable solution to us. It does seem as if it might present us with a clue though. If pre-sharpened edges don't roll and post-sharpened edges do then we might surmise that something about the sharpening process changes the characteristics of heat treated steel. That's really all there is to this portion of the experiment.
But even a successful experiment doesn't leave us at the final chapter in this case. Seems to us that edges that don't roll might be brittle. Brittle edges chip. If brittle edges that chip were OK with us we'd all be making and using cutting edges composed of ceramic. It's all just about understanding the process and then designing to maximize for a particular process/application. One thing we've learned during our years is that "there is no free-lunch in the physical world". You want an edge that doesn't roll? Its likely to be prone to chip. You want an edge that doesn't chip? It's likely to roll. We're all on a bus trip here, we just don't know, yet, where it's going to let us off.
Sharpening and then heat-treating wouldn't seem to be a viable solution to us. It does seem as if it might present us with a clue though. If pre-sharpened edges don't roll and post-sharpened edges do then we might surmise that something about the sharpening process changes the characteristics of heat treated steel. That's really all there is to this portion of the experiment.
But even a successful experiment doesn't leave us at the final chapter in this case. Seems to us that edges that don't roll might be brittle. Brittle edges chip. If brittle edges that chip were OK with us we'd all be making and using cutting edges composed of ceramic. It's all just about understanding the process and then designing to maximize for a particular process/application. One thing we've learned during our years is that "there is no free-lunch in the physical world". You want an edge that doesn't roll? Its likely to be prone to chip. You want an edge that doesn't chip? It's likely to roll. We're all on a bus trip here, we just don't know, yet, where it's going to let us off.