Blade nerdy but possible useful thing to have?

[bladeguy]

I wonder if this thing exist...

I am a DE beginner so checking out blades. I may be wrong, please tell me, but would it not been useful to have a sorted list of blade types? The first blade listed is considered the bluntest and last blade (feather :) the sharpest? I mean you would use it like fine tuning dial on analog old school radio: If I really like this blade then I check out 'nearby' blades.

Maybe a list exists.... maybe if not it could?

[dcobranchi]

Maybe a list exists.... maybe if not it could?

I doubt it could exist. Blade "sharpness" is very much a YMMV thing. A couple of examples, I like Derby blades and think they're plenty sharp. Other folks on the boards here complain that they pull and tug and couldn't cut warm butter. OTOH, I find Dorco ST-301 blades as pleasurable as shaving with a rusty can lid. Yet you'll find people who use them and think they're great sharp blades.

You'll just have to try a bunch of different blades and come to your own conclusion about which cuts best. And then you'll buy a second razor and find that the order of blades in your own personal list is all switched up.

[bladeguy]

Clearly sharpness is an objective measurable quantity of a blade (averaged over samples) for a given type of blades. Possible there are also other properties of the blades that are important but sharpness I would think is the most important. Ah well, when I think over it to many parameters to be practical. Interesting discussion here : http://theshaveden.com/forums/thread...on-down.25445/

[mblakele]

Clearly objective? And yet there are no standard units for sharpness.

Measurements are ad-hoc and difficult to reproduce: HHT (hanging hair test) relies on the sample hair and hanging technique, for example. Some academic papers use FTC (force to cut) measurement rigs, but they also tend to be ad-hoc and rarely attempt to mimic the mechanics of shaving to any degree.

And sharpness is not everything. You need a blade that is sharp enough to cut your hair comfortably, but after that factors like smoothness, longevity, packaging, and price weigh in. This is why blade samplers exist.

[waine]

I have discovered that blade preferance and performance is a very subjective subject...

[davros]

Presumably there are some kind of empirical, quantifiable traits of blades that manufacturers must use for QC and the like - they may not measure sharpness directly, but surely have something that somehow correlates to it. But I've never seen anything to suggest blade equivalents to stuff like blade gap, exposure et al.
You could probably come up with a division of blades into reputed categories of sharpness, but I doubt you'd manage more than 3 or 4 classes, and even that would prompt huge debate.

[mblakele]

Blade makers use cutting rigs to test their blades, measuring force-to-cut a given material. I think we have discussed video clips of those rigs here. There used to be a video linked from http://wiki.badgerandblade.com/Feather that might have shown one, but it looks like the video has been taken private recently. Anyway the problem is still that there is no standardized measurement: every blade-maker might use a different cutting material and slightly different mechanisms, so the rigs are only comparable to themselves. And they do not publish their data.

So why not publish some data? At http://bladetest.infillplane.com/htm...sharpness.html I see what looks like a homebrew cutting rig and some measurements with 40-wt rayon thread, for wood planing. That might be a good place to start. I think different sharpness classes are a good idea. You could standardize on a cutting rig and use different cutting materials to simulate different beard types. That would reflect the way blade X is sharp enough for many, but not sharp enough for some. It would be a relative standard, like material hardness numbers, but still useful.

[Chester]

There was a thread from a couple years back from a guy (Wil) who compared more than 100 blades against the feather... "Feather, the measure of all blades" was the subject. Here:
http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthr...+of+all+blades
And I don't recall if someone ever put the results in spreadsheet form, but you can search the thread for just about any blade you want.
-- Chet