Finally I tried to see if I can get constant result by having blade duels. I quickly tried KAI against Rapira PL. I tried several times with both blades and both edges. What was interesting is that Rapira PL had apparently one edge more sharp than the other. With one edge, it was almost a toss. Rapira won slightly more duels. With the other edge, Rapira won all duels. Then I checked how Rapira PL compares to Feather. The more dull edge always lost against Feather, while the sharper one was almost a toss, with a slight edge for Feather. Then i tried Voskhod against Rapira PL. Voskhod lost all duels, regardless of which edge I used. The system looks like this: I take some wool yarn and tie many loops. Then I begin the work by taking one loop at the time and placing them around the blades and pulling them apart. The test would need to be made with many blades of the same brand in order to catch a badly manufactured blade, also to avoid judging a blade because of differences in the yarn thickness.
In the tests above, I only tested one blade out of each brand to see if the test method works well enough to be usable. If there would statistically have been small enough difference, I would have concluded that the method of testing is worthless. Now it was clear that if you do at least 10 cuts with each edge of the blade, you get results you could trust for that particular blade. I would hope that somebody else would get interested in this method so we could collaborate to rank blades according to sharpness.
Interesting idea. You have removed variables from the testing. No soap, or angle due to how a razor is held. Straight up qualitative testing. Reminds me of this guy, but you are less crazy. Survival Of The Fittest Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels. Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round. I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world. Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment. When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes." This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion. There can be only one.
This is exactly what I want . I want to rank one variable. The rest of the variables needs to be tested with some fun (shaving). I found it interesting to notice with this test that blades are not the same sharp on both sides.
I am going to test Russian blades because of how affordable most of them are. I have blades of several brands at home, but not as many brands as in this sample pack: http://www.ebay.com/itm/85-mixed-Ru...lades-sample-pack-Rasierklingen-/222335453478 I am going to order this sample pack and then begin dueling the blades against each other to rank them all according to sharpness. Would anyone else want to repeat this, so we can rule out badly made tucks? Peer review of a test is always good. Additionally I am going to shave with each blade to give a subjective comment on of how smooth they feel.
Ever since I saw your original idea in another thread, I thought that this would work best if you dragged the blade over some kind of object to be cut down and used a dynamometer to measure the force needed to do so. The basic ones are only a few dollars but of course this would still be much more tedious than your current method. In the blades that I've been testing, I can definitely feel a difference between the sharpest blades, the middle ground blades, and the bad ones, but I still thought that it would be nicer if I had some real method to quantify sharpness. I've just been arbitrarily assigning ratings based on a Feather that I ranked at a solid 10.
try and duel the Feather vs GSB or 7 o'clock green Super Stainless or Astra SP or 7 o'clock Sharp Edge.... you will see that the Feather has very small slight edge sharpness wise only the first shave with WTG pass, smoothness is no where near as the other blades. Once your done with that 1st pass is all down hill for the Feather.... I can get max 3 shaves out of it, while the others 6 comfy shaves and I feel no need to push it any more.
I was thinking about this, but I decided to go to the blade dueling method because it does not require anything else than some yarn for reproducing independently the results. If you use any kind of meter (scale, dynamometer, whatever), there might be small differences between them and the questions is, are they exact enough to reproduce the results? If I rank a set of blade, and someone else rank different blades, the results can not be put together as you do not know if both instruments produce comparable results. I wanted a method that anyone could do and contribute to the result. Yes, it is a lot of work, but the more the work is split between those members interested in theoretical (not real shaving) results, the more doable it becomes.
My subjective opinion, before doing any duel is that at least GSB and Astra SP is far from Feather in sharpness. Both GSB and Astra SP tugs terribly for me, far more than even the second shave with a Feather. I will try to rank them in once I receive all blades I ordered yesterday.
Today in the morning, I decided to check if the results are comparable in real life shaving. I have many different kind of blades at home that I actually never tried shaving with. I do not know if it is because of laziness or because I had a working setup and did not want to "risk" bad shaves. I have had several years those Rapira PL in my drawer but never tested them. The thread about Lada blades caused me to dig up the Rapira blades and to do the duels I did yesterday. Yesterday, to my big surprise, my initial and still limited test showed that the Rapira blade I took out from the tuck was sharper than KAI and almost on level with Feather, with a small edge to Feather. In the PAA Bakelite Open Comb Slant review I did some days ago, I concluded that KAI was not sharp enough to go ATG with this particular razor. Today I tested how Rapira PL would go ATG. The Rapira blade I tested yesterday had one edge about the same sharp as KAI. This edge did pull on the ATG pass, as one can expect from the test result. The other sharper edge behaved like Feather, giving an OK shave also ATG. This shows so far with these limited tests I have done, that the results are comparable to real shave results.
I actually took wool yarn for my duels because We have plenty at home It is actually made out of hairs (sheep hair)
