Hi Clay,

Wow, that last image is amazing! More please.

btw, I think the forums are re-sizing your images, so the measurements/annotations you made to the image are too small to really see or read. Is there a way for you to show us those images without so much resizing? Maybe post them to your blog and then link that?

You also mentioned that CoorsTek gives measurements for surface-roughness of their ceramics in Ra. I'm not sure how they do those measurements, but I'm feeling unsure that they would use a contact profilometer to do it. This is because the extremely hard abrasives might wear out the stylus. The stylus that is dragged over the surface needs to be very sharp and precise. If it were dragged out along any very abrasive material, I think it would be damaged, or at least worn out. Maybe it's a diamond stylus. I don't know.

My guess (just a guess!) is that they use some type of non-contact profilometer to do their measurements. Since they are a huge company, one of the largest producers of technical ceramics, I would suppose they have invested in high-end optical (non-contact) profilometers and other fancy machines for doing surface measurements. Don't know if they would tell you, but maybe you could ask them out of curiosity?

If you don't mind me getting a bit philosophical:

I also only recently learned about profilometers. I call this an example of not-knowing what I don't know. For example, I don't know how to speak German, but I know enough to realize that, and I also know where I could go to learn to speak German. This is an example of knowing what I don't know. I think this is an important point for two reasons:

If I know what I don't know, then:
(1) I know how to gain more expertise.
(2) I can begin to assess my own level of expertise.

It's very difficult to do (1) and (2) if you don't know what you don't know. There is always trial-and-error... But it's probably better to leverage huge areas of research which have already been done.

One way I'm trying to figure out what I don't know, is to read up on engineering. Engineers and manufacturers have had to measure cutting performance, material strength, friction, and surface properties for centuries (even if you start counting as late as the Industrial Revolution, not to mention the ancient Egyptians). So along these lines, I've been browsing engineering, manufacturing, and science topics in places like Wikipedia, research papers, the library, YouTube, Amazon.com, and company websites. Ideally, it would be great to also do some sharpening tests, and talk to knife makers, etc.

I would humbly invite others to do the same, and then share with us what they find.

Sincerely,
--Lagrangian

Lagrangian,

As always, I love reading your posts and hearing your perspective. I think I can ask CoorsTek directly about what they're using. As for me, I'm grateful to everyone that occasionally hits me over the head and says "hey dummy, somebody already thought of that and there's a well defined method in place!" I'll continue to keep looking and hopefully will adopt some of the wisdom of your approach and I will, of course share.

My blog also shrinks the images but maybe I can stash them on Dropbox or a similar service and link the posts to the full sized images.

--Clay

AnthonyYan wrote:


Hey Anthony,
Just a data point, I am seeing the notation perfectly here. I am linking a small capture of the corner of one of Clay's images. If this is what you can't see...

I wonder if it is your browser or a setting that you are using?

Phil

If anyone is having difficulty viewing the images, maybe due to scaling being weird or cutting off the image, you can try grabbing the raw image by clicking and dragging it onto the address bar/tab list. Forum software likes to scale stuff pretty aggressively to save server resources, so even the raw image posted through the forum itself will be scaled down to whatever the built in size limit is.

They look fine on my end using Chrome and a 1920x1200 display, just as another reference point.

In one of Clay's images, he has very very tiny annotations. I can barely see them, and they are unreadable to me. I took Clay's image and marked where I see the annotations in red.

Clay's original image is here.

This is the same image with the areas of interest marked in red:


I was hoping to read what these were. Are you guys able to read these? I'm using Internet Explorer 9 in Windows 7.

Sincerely,
--Lagrangian

Heck no I can't read them...
I did not even see them before you circled them in red...
Would have never known that they were notations...
Phil