Reply To: Advantages and disadvantages of different sharpening techniques
It would be interesting to run some edge retention tests after using the WEPS upside down while the knife is immersed in a bucket of water – LOL.
That’s a creative idea right there. I never would have thought of that.
He talks about excess heat at the micro scale which is both unobservable and unmeasureable but certainly exists.
I’ve read this opinion on the web a few times, including some impressive claims of very high heat at the local level. I have also seen it refuted vigorously. Parts of the argument on both sides made some sense. To it, I’d add that it’s possible that the work-hardening that is claimed to happen at the very edge would need to be considered as well if someone is claiming that the localized heat is changing the heat treating and temper i.e. is the alleged annealing countered by the alleged work-hardening? To make sense of it, I guess the first thing we should ask is if our knives are behaving as though they were annealed. To most easily test it, we should take a hardened, sharpened blade and anneal it to see how it performs. Ideally, we’d have two identical blades from the same batch and we’d sharpen both, anneal one and then test them for edge retention.
I’m not a physicist or engineer, but I find it pretty hard to believe that a manual sharpening process on the Wicked Edge really generates enough thermal energy to ruin the heat treatment of the edge. The heat capacity of the steel at the edge is relatively small (meaning that it only takes a bit of energy to generate a relatively large change in temperature) but that also means that it only takes a small amount of cooling to dissipate that energy and keep the steel near room temperature.
