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Recommended cleaving tension
General
While the lifetime of a given section of the blade can
be very long (greater than 1,000 cleaves), it’s also very easy to damage the
blade due to excessive lateral stress (stress perpendicular to the edge of the blade).
The most common source to this is the result of the cleave tension being too low, the fiber will then move sideways across the edge
of the blade. A too low tension setting can usually be detected by a late cleave error message, a sizzling sound before the fiber
cleaves, or the fiber not being cleaved at all. It could also be a combination of these signs. A too high setting will usually not damage
the blade but instead result in a rough topography on the cleaved fiber end surface, so called hackle.
Blade intrusion
Usually a large intrusion (local damage) area from the cleaver blade is due to the cleaving tension being set too low, or a worn-out
cleaver blade section.
Hackle
Sometimes two areas (sometimes one large area) about 120° apart from the blade intrusion point can be seen on the end face. This
area looks like the surface of an orange peel
and is called “hackle”. This
results from a too high tension setting during cleaving. The
fiber rips apart too fast and therefore a rough area is created on the end face. Usually there is a need to find a trade-off with the
tension setting to achieve both a small blade intrusion and a small hackle area.
Recommended tension value to start with:
80µm cladding;
1,62N (160g)
125µm cladding;
2,20N (224g)
