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Why is a Guillotine blade diagonal?


[this is a public draft]

This is a theoretical counterpart to an experimental collaboration between KnowArt and Proper Printing to see if a diagonal guillotine blade cuts better than a horizontal one. So let’s assume a frictionless spherical cow, I mean neck, and calculate the contact point, force, and energy as a function of the angle of the blade. So now we can express the force from the contact area in terms of some constant \(k\) as \(F(y)=kL(y)\) perpendicular to the blade edge, resulting in a vertial and horizontal component:

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Photo of Guillotine

Guillotine

Photo of Guillotine blade

Guillotine blade