Any good straight razor is also leagues sharper. If you have further refined the edge with a few strokes on CrO loaded strop you are not even in the same ballpark anymore. It is also quite toothy and has a good bit to it, but they don't compare (meaning: they don't even come close!!) to a blade that is mirror polished on an UF Sharpmaker rod let alone one that was polished on a high grit waterstone. The edge bevel angle is relative small which aids the cutting ability. The blade is very thin so it has to displace very little material.

Whether that is considered sharp or not is a bit a question of definition. I looked at some under the microscope (from Swann-Morton to be precise) and they are like the ubiquitous cheap razor blades. I got the pleasure of spending the next day filling out incident reports for hospital administration. He didnt follow my first rule which is dont touch anything unless I tell you to. Mies, I had a guy slice off the tip of his thumb while I was training him on a Leice 2155 automated microtome. The roughness helps blood clotting giving it better binding sites and speeds up healing. This is a good thing if you want to reclose the cut which in most surgical cases is the goal. The razor edge cuts cleanly but not as cleanly as a highly polished blade (sharpened with an extra fine stone). If you are seriously curious as to how sharp these microtome blades really are, email me your address and Ill mail you a sample of one. I would estimate the bevel angle to be 15 degrees or less. I wouldnt want such a fragile edge on any of my knives. The cryostat and microtome blades that Mies mentioned are scary sharp, but very delicate. Rockwell hardness but I can attest that they will dull very quickly when cutting specimens with alot of fatty tissue. I also use them daily and they are basically razor blades.

The article went on to say that the surgeon was very impressed by the sharpness of the obsidian and felt that it was potentially superior to a scalpel. Apparently the guy needed surgery on his shoulder and convinced his surgeon to use obsidian. He said he was going to look into seeing if he couldn't get even sharper scalpels.ДЄlso, did anyone see the article in one of the knife mags about the flint knapper who made a set of scalpels from obsidian for his surgeon. He was very impressed and always thought scalpels were some of the sharpest blades available. I explained that I reprofiled the edge of the knife to make the edge thinner and blend better with the primary grind of the blade. He was somewhat of a knife collector and was rather interested in how I got my knives that sharp. He said he could tell under the microscope by how clean the edges of the cuts were compared to his scalpels. I was told by the microsurgeon that worked on my hand that the knife blade that cut my fingers was a lot sharper than his scalpels.

Obsidian scalpel under microscope