Abstract
Demands for shaver blade durability are constantly increasing. Current blades are processed with a variety of coatings, and evaluating the resultant sharpness has become important. When whiskers are cut with a shaver, the blades are known to draw out the whiskers while shaving them off. JIS-C9614 (Japanese Industrial Standards Committee) states that a blade is sharp if, when cutting 15 artificial hairs, it can shave 11 or more of them to less than 0.4 mm. However, this method of evaluating the length of drawn and cut hairs requires observation of one hair at a time, and is thus very inconvenient. As a simpler method of evaluating sharpness, we propose a method of measuring the force to pull a whisker into the shaver as it is cut. It was assumed that artificial hairs are pulled when the shaver blade cuts them. We carried out a test to measure the amount of the pulling force when an artificial hair is cut, and confirmed that there was indeed a pulling force when the whisker and the pulling force, and showed that the relationship was proportional. The above result demonstrated that measuring pulling force to determine shaving effectiveness is more convenient than the conventional method of observation.
