03-15-2018, 10:42 AM
Well that is good stuff me2 and thank you for the time devoted in putting that post together. Your remarks concerning carbide size are particularly helpful. Sorry if our photograph left you with nightmares Bud. While we're certain that it represents an over exaggeration of the situation, it is an attention grabber. It's useful for us to take a moment and think about the dimensions of things that we are dealing with. Often it leads to a better understanding. If we better understand a principle or problem then we can deal with or take advantage as the case may be.
We're not really so interested in burrs here as opposed to edges. We talk and ask about burrs in this thread only because it would seem that there would be a relationship between the metal that composes the burr and the eventual edge that the burr was directly attached to. Both burrs and edges seem to act in a contradictory manner to the steel they were spawned from. Perhaps that can be explained by plastic deformation or as Jan offered as a possibility, scaling effects of foils or...something else entirely.
A closing thought concerning carbides in steel: As some of you know, we stumbled into this edge testing business by accident. It was originally our intent to build a better knife sharpener. One based on the principles of the fiber optic polishing machines that we once manufactured and sold. Part of that design process required that we construct a series of solid custom abrasive wheels for the newly designed sharpener (edge grinder). We leaned toward a bonding agent/matrix (for the abrasives) that we had experience with but we knew that the agent was an abrasive in and of itself. In fact, we found that the abrasive particles in the agent were considerably larger than some of the finer abrasives we wanted to use. So we had to manufacture our own bonding agent that contained abrasive particles no larger than .3 micron. We find it curious that this same consideration wasn't given to CPM powder development (for knives) given that the business end of the bonding matrix (the edge) was bound to be much thinner than the carbides used. Not a criticism by any means because they must have their reasons but still, a question.
We're not really so interested in burrs here as opposed to edges. We talk and ask about burrs in this thread only because it would seem that there would be a relationship between the metal that composes the burr and the eventual edge that the burr was directly attached to. Both burrs and edges seem to act in a contradictory manner to the steel they were spawned from. Perhaps that can be explained by plastic deformation or as Jan offered as a possibility, scaling effects of foils or...something else entirely.
A closing thought concerning carbides in steel: As some of you know, we stumbled into this edge testing business by accident. It was originally our intent to build a better knife sharpener. One based on the principles of the fiber optic polishing machines that we once manufactured and sold. Part of that design process required that we construct a series of solid custom abrasive wheels for the newly designed sharpener (edge grinder). We leaned toward a bonding agent/matrix (for the abrasives) that we had experience with but we knew that the agent was an abrasive in and of itself. In fact, we found that the abrasive particles in the agent were considerably larger than some of the finer abrasives we wanted to use. So we had to manufacture our own bonding agent that contained abrasive particles no larger than .3 micron. We find it curious that this same consideration wasn't given to CPM powder development (for knives) given that the business end of the bonding matrix (the edge) was bound to be much thinner than the carbides used. Not a criticism by any means because they must have their reasons but still, a question.