Quote Originally Posted by mparker762 View Post
I hate arguments by authority, but the commercial razor blade manufacturers disagree with you. The friction i'm talking about isn't the friction between the whisker and blade after the whisker has been severed - its the friction between the whisker and blade while it's still being cut, as the blade is forcing the whisker apart. The initial effort to separate the strands of fibrin is determined by the edge width, but the whisker is as much as 180 microns across, so the two halves of the whisker are riding up the bevel quite a ways, and the whisker in front of the cutting edge is being stretched as the blade is forcing the two halves apart, acting like a spring and pulling the two halves tightly against those bevels. This can cause substantial friction, and substantial resistance.
A fair explanation
I don't know enough about this topic, so I'll accept your point.
Quote Originally Posted by mparker762 View Post
Of course we can. The edge doesn't get any sharper past about 4k (...)
That goes against all my observations and against all logic.
Why would an edge be continuously be able to be defined between thiner boundaries, as we progress through increasingly finer hones, and certainly stop doing that at the 4K level?
If it were true, this would mean I could hone an razor till it peaks at my Chosera 5K (I'm sorry it's not 4K) and next, just suffice to replace the Chosera scratch pattern on a Coticule with water (that's how I eventually finish the vast majority of my edges), and end up with a result that meets my standards? I have to ask you to take my word for it, but that razor would not be sharp enough to my standards.

Talking about Verhoeven: I scanned through his paper once more. Where does he state that the edge width (EW) stops decreasing at 4000 grit?
Verhoeven reports about how the edge width decreases from stropping on CrO or on 1µ diamond paste. "The 1 micron diamond abrasive produced optimum edge widths of around 0.3 microns, while the CrO abrasive gave only slightly larger EW values, around 0.4 microns."
Maybe those guys saying that diamond paste is "harsher" than CrO, are talking about too keen edges after all.

If the differences are that significant on paste particles of 1µm and 0.5µm, then I don't believe that they will only be in the nanometer region on hones that use abrasives coarser than that.

Bart.