Sharpness Chart

[Bud]

I've been thinking about this for awhile so I'll quit thinking and just lay it out there. I'm not being critical even one little bit because I think I understand where Mr. Knifegrinders is coming from with his sharpness chart. He's trying to make the BESS scale more understandable to people who aren't familiar with it. BESS did this themselves by comparing with a razor blade. Once people get used to the BESS though I think this becomes unnecessary and the understanding happens very quickly. 150 is 150 and 300 is 300. You don't have to think that because it's 50 outside that that temperature = a long sleeve shirt and a light jacket. It's just 50 degrees and your experience tells you how comfortable or uncomfortable that temperature is. Same with BESS now for me. 150 is sharp and 300 not so much. That's one of the beauties of the BESS. You really don't have to think about it much. As they say these days - it is what it is.

[grepper]

Wise, well considered words Mr. Bud. BESS has revolutionized not only understanding sharpness but also communicating it. Once you get it, it is so simple. Thanks Mr. Mike.

[KnifeGrinders]

I've been thinking about this for awhile so I'll quit thinking and just lay it out there. I'm not being critical even one little bit because I think I understand where Mr. Knifegrinders is coming from with his sharpness chart. He's trying to make the BESS scale more understandable to people who aren't familiar with it. BESS did this themselves by comparing with a razor blade. Once people get used to the BESS though I think this becomes unnecessary and the understanding happens very quickly. 150 is 150 and 300 is 300. You don't have to think that because it's 50 outside that that temperature = a long sleeve shirt and a light jacket. It's just 50 degrees and your experience tells you how comfortable or uncomfortable that temperature is. Same with BESS now for me. 150 is sharp and 300 not so much. That's one of the beauties of the BESS. You really don't have to think about it much. As they say these days - it is what it is.

LOL at 50 outside = a long sleeve shirt and a light jacket.
Bud, yours 50 outside for us = shorts and a singlet.

I also thought a DE Safety Razor would be good enough to relate to, but it turned out to be good only for guys who are old enough to remember using it.

Similarly to how Farenheit is meaningless to the other half of the world till converted to Celsius, BESS hits peoples' mental blindspot till related to something they know, and most people cannot even see things they don't recognize

[Ken S]

We need to get beyond our ignorance of measurement standards. One of the common complaints about third party grinding wheels for the Tormek is that they are oversize. The diameter for the larger Tormek wheels is 250mm. Some of the third party wheels are around 253mm. My guess is that they were never intended to be 253mm or any metric size. I suspect some bozo ordered "10 inch" wheels. Guess what, they don't fit! And, they are probably manufactured in a metric country! The Tormek is a metric machine; let's let it be metric. (Interestingly enough, the threads for the adjustable feet on the Tormek Work Station are 5/8x13tpi, not metric. The work station is made in Germany for a Swedish company. Did they run out of metric threads?)

Sometimes we have very good standards which are ignored. POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is generally used in a demeaning way. However, if one bothered to examine the tariff documents between the telephone companies and the state utility commissions, the minimum quality standard measurements are clearly spelled out. If a telephone line meets these required minimum standards for loop current, signal loss, noise and balance, the transmission quality for the line will be excellent, generally superior to the transmission of cel service. The problem is that most employees are either ignorant of these standards or ignore them; management is more concerned with their bonuses; customers are blissfully ignorant of them; and regulators don't seem interested. I was the oddball employee who cared about standards.

I think BESS standards are a long overdue excellent idea. With BESS, my distinguished collegues in Australia and I have a verifiable standard measurement for edge sharpness (even if we don't speak the same language  )

Thanks, Mike.

Ken

[EOU]

This is the kind of thread subject we like to chip in on because, in our opinion, everyone is right. Bud is correct because instrumentation users very quickly start speaking and more importantly "thinking" in terms of sharpness numbers as opposed to anecdotal terms and tests. KG is right because you first have to get the horse up to the trough before he'll drink. We suppose that it would be much easier to teach a Frenchman to speak English if the instructor speaks both languages. KG is speaking two languages with his sharpness chart. 

Here is a little anecdotal "language" story of our own. One of us here had a high school Spanish teacher who would travel down to a small, inland, Mexican village for several weeks each Summer.  The moment he showed up in this small Mexican village the number of English speakers in it swelled to 1. Of course this was his way to keep his Spanish speaking skills sharp. He told his Spanish class that he always knew the instant that he had accomplished his task when he realized that he had begun to  "think" in Spanish. That's what edge sharpness instrumentation users do, they begin, very quickly, to "think" in BESS numbers and thank you very much to Bud, KG and Ken for expressing their thoughts, examples and experiences on the matter here.