Proxy for sharpness

[ZrowsN1s]

150 - 200 is where a utility razor would fall. 137 will most definitely shave and split a hair. I'd call that hair splitting not whittling. It would need to be sharper for that.

A shaving double sided razor would be around 50 BESS

I call it good when I can wave cut magazine paper or receipt paper. This level will definitely shave hair. Where would that fall on the Bess?

I imagine somewhere between 50-150. Same with shaving, etc.

It's why I got a BESS tester, all of these other methods are very good indicators of a knife that is what most people would agree is "sharp". Even a decent indicator of different levels of 'sharp'. But that still leaves big gaps when trying to describe performance in a meaningful way.

One person's idea of hair whittling or smooth cutting may not be the same as someone elses. Even if your talking wave cutting recipt paper. Lets say anything under 150 BESS will do that. Then you've still got everything between 0-150 that falls in that range. So someone with a knife thats 150 BESS and someone with a knife thats 90 BESS would say, it will wave cut recipt paper. Even though there is a significant difference in sharpness between them.

With the BESS you can measure a 1 gram difference in the force required to cut the test media. It gives you a quantifiable and repeatable number.

It's certainly not a perfect measure. It's a measure of push cut sharpness, not slicing sharpness, so blade finish can play a big role, and things like BTE thickness don't play as big a role than they do in real world cutting. But I really like being able to put an actual number to things. It allows me and anyone else with a BESS tester to accurately compare things.

[Alexander135]

It depends on the edge that I want and knife that I'm sharpening. Kitchen knives= cleanly slicing computer paper.
Pocket knives=shaving sharp.
Junk blades/freebies for friends and family=feeling for bite with my thumb.

These are just generalizations but largely that's what I do

[bdblue]

I don't get real scientific with it, I use thin paper like newspaper, phone book paper, or similar paper we get in the mail with advertisements. I don't worry about slicing the paper, that's the easy part, I look at how easy the edge catches the edge of the paper parallel to the grain to initiate a cut.

I never took the time to learn shaving technique or hair whittling. I usually don't need my knives to be that sharp anyway, but if they are sharp enough for slicing thin paper as I mentioned above then I know I've done the sharpening properly up to that point. I have good luck sharpening my knives with S30V, D2, M4, Rex45 and S110V. Maybe those steels aren't as prone to have nagging burrs. Where I have problems is sharpening cheap knives for friends and I suspect those steels do have stubborn burrs.