When I was a kid one of my uncles took me on a tour of the shop where he worked. He was a machinist and worked for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. In fact he made the first heart-lung machine. In showing off the shop, he took me by a machine which absolutely facscinated me. That machine sharpened knives used to section samples for pathology work. It had a large, horizontal circular plate that looked like green glass and which rotated slowly against a knife held in a clamp that would hold one side to the plate, then rotate it so the other side was held to the plate. Once having gone through the correct number of cycles to get sharpened properly, these knives would slice off .002" thick sections of samples so they could be microscopically examined.

I just figure that somehow we should be able to not only replicate edges like that, but also be able to describe them as well. Perhaps it is not as simple as pointing to the picture and saying, "see, see, that's what it should look like," but it would be something pretty close to that. "Get close to that appearance, and you're probably using a correct technique and getting close to the edge you want."

Dream on grasshopper, dream on, Bruce