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Originally Posted by kisak
Isn't there a problem with those where they tend to behave in a rather brittle fashion, despite being quite tough on paper? I seem to recall hearing that they had a nasty tendency of focusing all the stress in one point, leading to that point failing while the rest of the material was basically just sitting there and twiddling its thumbs.
As for those biocomposites, I'm not entirely familiar with them, but there's a vague memory in my head of them using extremely thin layers of the material to get the properties? In that case, it actually sounds pretty close to the bainitic steels, as those seem to obtain their properties from the aggregates of extremely thin crystal plates. (This would seem to be a very different concept from the type of folding traditionally done to steel in many parts of the world, with very different results.)
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I also wonder if there might not be a point where the exact width of the outermost edge doesn't really matter all that much any more, as the rest of the knife needs to be pushed into the material as well to the depth of the cut.
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Good points on the metal glasses. The answer is, I'm not sure where they are in development, and given the way stressed silicon glass works (as described), I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar problems with metal glass. I think some knife makers were experimenting with them, but they're out of my price range.
I absolutely agree about the problem of blade weight. I have a ceramic paring knife, and it sits there, mostly unused. It's ridiculously sharp, of course, but it's also about as light as a plastic knife, and the blade chips if it hits bone. The light weight means that it's actually more work to cut with it (no mass to work with) and the ceramic chips if it hits bone the wrong way. I do have a diamond hone that can resharpen it, but basically, it's less useful than the first-generation ginsu knife that I inherited from my grandmother, although it cost ~100x more.
The variable knife suffers from this problem. You have the edge, but you've got to lever the darn thing. Slice whips (the generic cyberpunk name for monomolecular wires with no support) have the same problem of no weight behind the edge, and you've got to be really, really careful that you don't garrote yourself when you're swinging one.
Anyway, I'll leave you with a retro-futuristic knife, made from modern materials in a paleolithic shape. That's right, it's a handaxe made from modern ceramics. Gotta love those designers (
Link). Anybody want to try it?
Best,
F