Burr Removal

[Rossy66]

I am starting to do a fair amount of lopers and pruning shears and was wondering if it's worth removing the burr? Since they are used for outdoor and heavy work, I thought maybe the burr would help "grab" the vegetation, similar to regular scissors.

[RichColvin]

An article by Larrin, "How Chipping of Edges Happens at a Microscopic Level" (on Knife Steel Nerds), debunks the idea of coarse edges due to the increased propensity for chipping and faster dulling of the blade. As noted by Dr. Vadim Kraichuk, "Meat plants are well aware that knives with coarse edges worsen product presentation and increase operators' fatigue and repetitive strain injuries. On the contrary, polished edges improve product quality through higher value cuts and increase throughput."

It is a common, but quite bad, practice of drawing the newly sharpened knife edge through a piece of wood or some other media to "rip off" the remnants of the burr. When this is done, the ripped off metal builds up on the front of the slice, and you then drag the rest of the edge through this crud. This crud, together with breaking off of ledges of material along the edge, will roughen the edge and worsen sharpness.

The scanning electron microscope (SEM) images to the pictures lined show the burr on a knife in the 1st image, that was then "ripped off" by cutting cross-grain into a piece of redwood in the 2nd image - loss of the sharp edge is obvious.

https://sharpeninghandbook.info/GT-Knives-Ripped-Burr.html

Key take-away from these photos : don't skip the honing step.

Dr. Larrin Thomas' book, Knife Engineering: Steel, Heat Treating, and Geometry (2025), discusses burr removal quite well.