well that chart did not take here on the forum board software, so let me try it again as a JPG..

BassLakeDan wrote:


Thanks for jumping in and for your feedback and healthy skepticism. I took a photo last night of the CPM-154 blade after polishing with the .5 micron strops with a hair from my nephew's head for comparison:





You can just barely see the faint scratches on the surface and it seems possible to imagine fitting quite a lot of them into the width of that hair.

Added a couple more with measurements, these are all 500x magnification:

BassLakeDan wrote:


Hey Dan, thanks for the reality check! Put our feet on firm ground again . I'll think of that hair when I am staring through the microscope at a 1 micron scratch... (Or better yet, make a photograph of the hair after it has passed the hanging hair test .)

Went back to the 1 micron shot with the most clearly defined scratches and added a .050mm scale. A micron is .001mm, so if we can fit 50 of those scratches into the space of that scale, we're looking good:

I thought I'd go for something completely different.

So yesterday I did some stropping with a stropping paste from Dovo, a German company that makes straight razors. It is probably the most used stropping paste where I live. (Yes, next to Germany.) I went for the "green paste", since it is the coarsest stropping compound they offer, which should leave most traces. It supposedly contains 5-8 micron chromium oxide.

I wanted to know whether it worked like the Wicked Edge pastes, with a lot of burnishing. And I wondered whether it would be more abrasive than the Wicked Edge pastes, leaving wider scratches. Perhaps of a 5-8 micron size or a little lower?

I can reveal already that the Dovo paste hardly (or not at all) burnishes. And for abrasion... well, read my blog .

I am happy with my Wicked Edge pastes.

wickededge wrote:


That is an interesting observation! The diamonds in the paste were also very good at hiding. What is that paste doing?

Makes me think of that old joke of two diamonds in a jewellery shop when two rich ladies come in. The diamonds immediately hide in some stropping compound...

I am still interested in why you thought the results of the tapes were not overwhelming, Clay. It was my impression they resulted in a pretty even scratch pattern (in your second series of photographs) resembling that made by a stone.

mark76 wrote:


I think we were looking at it differently - you were looking for scratches and I was looking for smoothness! Now that I understand a little better, I'd agree that the edge does look good in terms of a nice, even and well distributed scratch pattern.

Nice write up on your blog. Thanks for making that test.

Clay, some of the edges you've posted photographs of are among the smoothest I've ever seen. Have you ever done any cutting test with them? My thoughts are that they should be very good in push cutting, but I don't know exactly what this smoothing does to the edge of the edge?