Ways to use Cardboard to measure durability

In the world of steel things are difficult to measure.  There are many areas from degradation, toughness and hardness to think about when it comes to choosing the correct kind of steel. There are lots of different tools to measure this and some people have chosen to use a household item or an item that is used by knives the majority of the time to create a system for understanding how good a steel is at a certain task. This has helped many people over the years to know what is worth the money or what is purely money spend on looks and brand name. Cardboard and rope have become youtube specialites for knife cutting test and I want to go over how this can help the average person.

 

Now repeatability is very important when it comes to scientific tests. So two Youtubers that run knife channels use two different mediums when it comes to testing edge retention.  One uses rope and the other uses cardboard.  Now to be more specific the cardboard is actually cheap moving boxes which are actually corrugated paper.  THere is a big difference, it is the difference between cheap moving boxes and a cereal box. We all know that is a big difference. These individuals will take a knife and sharpen it to the exact degree and grit and cut the same type of cardboard over and over again until it is dull. 

He then looks at it with a micrometer to make sure it is dull and not just an emotional reaction or a physical reaction to cutting.  Then he records the number of slices it takes to scientifically get dull.  Then that steel has a base number to compare against other steels.  This chart can tell you which steels are better than others and you can take the cost comparison between them to see how much it is worth going from one performance to another and see which is worth the cost and which is not.

 

Another youtube reviewer uses rope instead of cardboard.  This test is done in a similar fashion but the rope tends to be less dense so the cuts tend to be much higher.  Due to this I feel like a more accurate depiction is actually given due to the more refined numbers he is able to acquire on the density and edge retention. So for me I like to use the rope test to see the percentage and price difference in knife steels.