Thank you for purchasing a PT50 Sharp
. From now on you will always know precisely how
sharp the edges on your best knives really are. Sharp
determines the sharpness of edges the
same way you do - by measuring the amount of force required to cut through a medium. When
a knife requires the application of a great amount of force to cut or slice through a material
then you know that it is dull. In that same manner Sharp
measures, very precisely, the force
required to sever a carefully engineered standard test media. The number displayed by the
PT50 after a test is completed will be your BESS C scale score. Please consult the graph at the
end of this manual for more information on the BESS. This number represents the number of
grams of pressure required to sever the test media with your knife. The lower the number the
sharper the edge. The PT50 displays pressure readings in 5 gram increments from 0 - 2000
grams.
The PT50 is a simple three button operation. The calibration and mode buttons on the PT50 are
used in the factory for set-up and test purposes. The button on the right is the
on/off
button
and the button on the left
zero's
the instrument. Pressing the SHARP
button places the
instrument in sharpness test mode . You'll always know when the instrument is in test mode via
the blue back lit display. Although you will typically try to begin the measurement process with
the display sitting at zero, in fact, zeroing is not always required nor necessary. The
measurement system employed by Sharp
is a "greater than" methodology meaning that the
instrument is always looking for the maximum amount of pressure applied to the test media
during any one measurement event. As an example let's say that we are measuring a knife edge
that will, eventually, require more than 300 grams of pressure to sever the test media. If the
KT20 display is reading 100 grams when the measurement process begins, force applied to the
test media by the knife edge will not begin to register until
more than
100 grams of pressure is
applied to it. So, in this case. whether or not the display reads "100" or "0" at the beginning of
the measurement process has no effect on the final test result.
