work hardening

[Jan]

Well, we thanked Ken for opening this topic up in our first post here and encouraged comment so thank you all very much. We are bouncing in here because a post by Jan touched on an area that we have regarded as one of the possible explanations for the part of the edge improvement phenomena that we have attributed to Sharp Pad and work hardening. When working with common stainless kitchen knives in the HRC55 hardness range we see burr formations that behave nothing like "brittle" or hardened steel but very much like soft steel. Very much the same process used to "work and bend" a paperclip into two pieces is required to "work and bend" the burr away from the edge. Is this definitive evidence in support of the hypothesis? Of course not. It does cause us to wonder though if the steel that composes the burr has been transformed in some manner. There are other possibilities as well but there is no need to speculate. As mentioned in our original post we will be testing for the efficacy of this process. If the tests indicate significant edge improvement we will work backward and try to understand why. So please don't go away! EOU will soon be dining on duck or eating crow. Possibly something in between - cruck?

EOU, your promising statement is appreciated. Thank you for dropping hints concerning the burr formation and its behaviour. Good luck in hypothesis testing. Keep us posted, please. 

Jan