Improvement in Wear Characteristics of Electric Hair Clipper Blade Using High Hardness Material

Abstract

  Making the angle of a hair clipper blade edge acute improves its cutting ability but causes the edge to be susceptible to wear, resulting in decreased cutting service life. When we used an electric hair clipper with a movable blade having a 45° acute angle on its edge, the edge caused significant wear and thus shortened its cutting service life. In this research, we conducted experiments on the cutting service life by cutting artificial hairs and, according to the experiment results, verified that using a high-hardness blade would suppress the wear of the blade edge to increase the cutting service life. Furthermore, assuming that “degradation in blade sharpness is subject to the wear loss of the blade edge and the wear loss depends on the distance at which the blade edge slides on the cross section of the hair; in other words, on the total number of strands of hair cut and the hardness of the blade materials”, we estimated the cutting service life from the blade hardness, and obtained excellent agreement between the estimated and test results. When using blades having different initial edge angles and radii, the concept of this cutting service life estimation enables us to facilitate estimation of their cutting service life.