As some of you may know, I've recently been bothering the fine people at my local university (of which I'm proud alumni!) to use their digital kilns to harden a greater range of knife steels. I've become rather good friends with some of the lecturers there, and already knew some of the other quite well from my own days there. Long story short I got into explaining my slight obsession with knives and my up and coming knife comparison.
"I just can't tell which of these is sharper to be honest" may have come out of my mouth. The response, "whey lets find out we have the gear here." turned into a day of thoroughly interesting messing about. Under close supervision of one of the real microscopy experts I was shown some of the blades I had with me under their Hitachi S3000N SEM, results below for anyone that's interested! There was a new unused Stanley blade as a control too
Stanley as a control.
embarrassed to say looking at the image, my current EDC, a boker techtool 1. And even still that's bloody sharp!
To the 2 knives in question
spyderco domino, unsharpened but stropped, straight out of the box, difference is amazing!
Most amazing my Shirigorov F3 after a fair amount of use and never being sharpened! Always said it was sharp enough to make a scalpel blush.
Massive thanks to the guys there today obviously for letting me mess about with some amazing tools and for their as always engaging conversation and help. Real stand up chaps, although unfortunately not camping types!