Thread: Verhoeven Paper Question

abrasion: removal of material by friction with another.
friction: a force applied from rubbing one material against another.
significant: with effective relevance

That said:
Friction is a force. That force may pull chunks out of something, or it may not, in which case the energy of that force is released into heat.
There's always a ratio between those two. Grating cheese is causing much abrasion and little heat. Rubbing a wooden stick over a file is causing much abrasion and little heat. Rubbing that same wooden stick over another piece of wood is causing little abrasion and much heat. Do it fast enough and you can start a fire.

Theoretically, you can abrade steel with a stream of water. But has that any effective relevance for our honing practice at home?

From an engineering viewpoint (since you seem so keen on dismissing science as a valid source of truth), there's abrasion and there's burnishing. The former relies on removal of material. The latter relies on plastic deformation of the surface (plastic flow). Any decent textbook about finishing metal surfaces will provide that information. Polishing is combination of both and the finer the polishing medium the more the principles of burnishing enter the mix.

There is little doubt in my mind that a clean leather strop relies heavily on burnishing. Verhoeven found no significant abrasion in clean leather (but of course that makes him a moron according to you, doesn't it), hence that leaves me with burnishing. Burnishing=plastic deformation=(re)aligning the tip of the edge instead of abrading it.

I won't deny that you can knock a small fold-over bur off the edge of your tools. Or maybe the strop just grabs the bur and aligns it in the right direction where it actually becomes the tip of the edge. Who's to tell? But on a razor there is no fold-over bur to break off. There is just the edge, and after carefully considering all the variables I say a clean leather strop (re)aligns the edge, with the aid of friction (which is no synonym for abrasion, as you incorrectly suggested).