Originally Posted by
D.W.
Just thinking out loud here, but if you take two pieces of steel from the same coil and you cryo treat one and not the other and put them in identical saws or jigs, sharpened identically, I wonder if you could make a device that would cut wood with them. After so many minutes of cutting, you could inspect the wear and then test each in the same piece of wood, seeing if there are any differences (e.g., how many strokes it takes to get through a piece of wood) until such device would no longer cut.
A couple of years ago, I recall someone taking about thirty strokes with a rasp and then contending because they could see more wear on an uncoated rasp than the coated rasp that everyone should buy the coated rasp (which was something sold by someone they were compensated by).
Joel at TFWW here quickly put the advice to bed by suggesting that they had designed a machine to stroke a rasp several million times and that as the rasps dulled, they actually cut faster, and that their uncoated rasps lasted more than most people could ever reasonably expect to stroke a rasp in regular use.
You wouldn't have to have anything advanced, just a machine that reciprocated maybe 4 inches and attached to the saw plate and allowed you to put some amount of weight on the spine (be it a few ounces or whatever). When a saw was dull enough that it was no longer doing anything other than burnishing, you could call it good.
That would, of course, take some time, but you wouldn't have to do the same exercise more than twice, and you could use something like cocobolo to accelerate saw wear.