I saw that a number of people are using the Besse machine for sharpness testing so I ordered on to compare with the one I built from BassLakeDan’s plans. I’m happy to say the two correlate extremely well. It’s even possible to establish a ratio between different media between the two machines which is really convenient.
We’re now in the process of automating some of the testing. We’ve got a small CNC rigged up to a media holder and a jig for holding the knife blade. We will be able to program different slicing motions to test against rope, carrots, whatever we can manage to grip in our media holder. We’re using the x-axis of the CNC table to tension the media and capturing the force via a load cell and running the signal back to the Arduino that controls the motors so that the tensioning motor will stop once a specified tension is reached. The knife will then come over and begin to slice. We’ll be able to capture the force across the y-axis by continuing to capture data from the tension load cell and we’ll also be able to capture the downward force because the whole media holder is mounted on another load cell. Once we get it all up and running, it should be super exciting.
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