Gen 3

Hi juneau. Last I heard from Clay, the LAA won’t work with the Gen III. But, I’m far from official so maybe a message to Clay would be best.

There you go! I’m not the least bit surprised you guys are already working on a fix.
Do you ever sleep?

It was good seeing you at the NJ show.

Are there plans to see how the mechanism holds up to cyclic testing?

We haven’t done any formalized testing though we have had a few units at trade shows where we sharpen hundreds of knives and also operate the mechanisms hundreds more to show the functionality. What do you suppose an average number of lifetime cycles a unit would see?

I’d bet TC Meyer would have some good information on MTBF(mean time between failure). I studied it in school but have no practical experience. I seem to remember taking the estimated cycles desired and DOUBLING them?

Also I think the repetitive mechanical action is usually cycled on a mechanical jig of some sort.

The impression I got was this thing is more then stout enough to handle years & years of service. B)

Something else to consider. According to Google the minimum wage in New Mexico is $8.75. So for 80 hours work or $700.00 Clay and his gang could brag “The Gen 3 vise we are demonstrating has clamped more than 60,000 blades!”

But the QC guy that has to oversee the min wage guy to make sure he does all he’s being paid to do gets $50hr as consultant and a Hotel room plus expenses.

I think the Vise would appeal to professional sharpeners. I have no idea how many blades they do a day. If they take 10 minutes to sharpen a blade maybe 50 a day?

If they work 250 days a year that would be 12,500 a year. If you expect the devise to hold up 5 years that would be 62,500 cycles.

If you hired someone at minimum wage and they clamped and released a blade every 4 seconds that would be 15 cycles a minute. So to get 62,500 cycles it would take about 10 days work.

These are all uneducated estimates and may not be close to what is correct

And, on the low end…. if I did three blades a week (a little above my average) that would be 150 blades a year for 5 years would be 750 cycles.

That’s quite a range. And, if it’s built to last 5+ years for Tuffy, Josh, Clay, Bob, Mark, Kyle, etc. it is going to easily last for me….