For centuries, no one has found a precise DIY method to measure a knife’s sharpness. Until now.
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It’s a quantifiable method to precisely compare the sharpness so that we can show the “before” and “after” degree of sharpness.
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No matter how good your knife is, eventually it gets dull. So, one has to decide, is it time to sharpen it? If I sharpen it, how much time should I spend on the sharpening? By the way, you know you could in fact make a sharp knife a lot duller if you don’t know whether your way is improving or making it worse.
I have just found a genius way to compare the sharpness of knives. I guarantee that you have never seen anything like it anywhere else.
Here, I have one dull knife and two sharp ones. However, how much better is one compared to the other? And what about those knives which are not too sharp but not too dull? Wouldn’t it be nice if we can quantify our answers.
How do you compare knives’ sharpness? How do you know you have actually sharpened the knife and you did not waste your time?
Let’s first develop a quantifiable method to precisely compare the sharpness so that we can show the “before” and “after” degree of sharpness.
We use the knife to cut off a segment of a thread and tie ends of the thread together to make a loop.
We start out by putting a styrofoam packaging scrap on top of a kitchen weight scale. The size of the loop needs to be larger than the styrofoam plus the scale, and the styrofoam needs to be long enough that the thread does not touch the scale.
Now you will see how to compare two knives, one dull one and one sharp one.
We lift the scale and use the sharp knife to cut the thread. Notice the scale shows that the weight starts increasing. Slowly increase the force until the thread is cut. This will enable you to find the smallest weight (or force) needed to cut the thread.
Write down the weight. For this case, my thread and my sharp knife, the weight is 8 Oz. This is the smallest weight to cut off the thread.
If you don’t have a weight scale, at the end of this video I will show you an alternative way to do it.
Now repeat these steps to measure the dull knife. For me with the same thread and increasing the force at the same slow speed as before, it took 2 pounds and 8 Oz.
This means the difference between the dull and sharp knife is 2 pounds, a precise and quantifiable comparison.
If you have a different weight scale, you may choose different thread’s thickness so that you have a wide enough range to compare your knives.
What I have just shown you is the most powerful method in humans’ long history of knife sharpening. You have never heard of it because I just discovered it.
Before I discovered this method, after working on sharpening a knife for 15 minutes, I always asked myself: “should I spend another 15 minutes to make it better?” or sometimes “did I just make it worse”?
So my method helps with three things:
1. It saves time. There is no wasting your time continuing your work if no further sharpening is needed.
2. You can focus on the dull spot to sharpen instead of working on already sharpened edges. Just because I used my knife to cut chicken bones once does not mean I have to spend 2 hours sharpening the whole thing.
3. You can test many different sharpening hacks with the tools you have, and learn which one works, which one does not.
I know I won’t get Nobel Prize for this, but it is so ingenious and useful, please share it as long as we get the credit. Once we have this method of comparison, next we are going to examine a lot of different ways to sharpen a knife, and share with you our results.
If you don’t have a weight scale, you can count the number of coins. Put some coins in a bag.
I lift the bag with the dull knife. I will keep adding more coins until the knife cuts the thread.
Since we have this genius way to compare knife, we can have many follow up videos. Please let me know which one is of interest to you.
How sharp are those $1 knife from the Dollar Tree store?
How to use whetstone without wasting your time?
How to make an angle guide?
Which sharpening tool is better?
Under what condition would some of these sharpening hacks fail?
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How To Measure The Exact Sharpness Of Your Knife #GeniusAsianhttps://t.co/MRdTXzap4E
— Genius Asian (@RealGeniusAsian) May 8, 2018