Thread: Good Info - has anyone seen this

Originally Posted by Pithor

As far as the scientific criticism goes, I think he could be doing much worse.

Sure, he could just make up stuff without any evidence like so many do. Given that he has free access to multimillion dollar equipment, the ability to use it well and extensive professional training - a PhD degree and post-doctoral experience - the quality of findings is highly unsatisfactory.
Like any other scientist I've been reviewing other peoples research for publications since graduate school (and had mine reviews) and this is just low level 'look at the pretty picture' type of data collection. The analysis of the data is poor and does not provide understanding.

For example take your quotes - he doesn't see that the size of the abrasive particles in the slurry changes with use and states that the slurry becoming "less abrasive" is an "accepted observation". So the abrasiveness of the particles in the slurry isn't determined by their size but by something else that changes with use. What is this? The first obvious hypothesis would be 'the shape', but that's not pursued in even the crudest manner, or even posited it. That's not a good science by any objective measure.

Originally Posted by Pithor

On claiming new insights, I couldn't find other than he states that "The goal is to provide an understanding of what is happening a [sic] the blade’s edge", but I might have missed something.

I don't remember everything I had issues with because it was almost three months ago, but there was more than one case. Ah, there was "This result indicates that the bevel set is completed at the 4k level, not the 1k level as commonly believed." This is an example of an arbitrary definition of what 'setting a bevel' means as the geometry changes in the honing progression are contiguous not abrupt.
He has picked two length scales relevant to the edge and is calling one of them 'sharp' the other 'keen'. There is absolutely no motivation for picking these particular length scales vs. something else (other than they're trivial for the microscope to measure). The obvious correlation between these two length scales along with an arbitrary parameter of 3microns makes his choice to treat them as independent parameters very unsatisfactory.

The difference is that he is a scientist and the bar is much higher than what he is presenting.

I don't care much about his conclusions, just the pictures that he puts up. I doubt that for most of us, it's going to change much. Pictures are interesting, though.

Great read, the burr has been giving me problems honing. I am considering trying spine leading strokes for bevel correction and edge leading for the rest of my progression.

If you do enough laps on your fine stone to remove the entire amount of scuzz left on the edge by the coarse stone, it shouldn't matter too much.

Actually, it shouldn't matter that much what you do with the coarse stones as long as you don't leave damage that the next stones can't remove. I've never had any regard for what those stones are doing until I get to a finish stone, just as long as whatever evidence is left on the blade is metal and no marks that weren't created by the last stone.

Yes, and any tiny microscopic remnants of the wire edge should be removed by stropping.