Hello Mike, hello everybody. My name is Johanka and I am a secondary school student. I am using the account of my grandfather. I am not a knife-sharpener but last year I have learned how the BESS scale works. I will post here how it happened.
As I learned in physics about force I needed to know what is the difference between weight and mass. My grandfather Jan explained it to me on the example of the BESS scale. He told me that Mike measures edge sharpness by the size of force which is necessary to cut the test medium. Mike uses a digital scale which measures force but calculates and displays mass in grams.
We have built a simple sharpness tester from Lego. On our kitchen scale we can read how many grams would create a weight which would be able to cut an elastic band. Our kitchen scale weights up to 5000 grams and so I think it could measure even the "sharpness" of a completely dull axe.
I hope I am correct if not please correct me.
Johanka