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Anago Sharpness Testing Machine

Anago is a New Zealand based company who invented and commercialised knife sharpness testing technology. Peter Dowd the inventor of this technology designed the equipment with a vision that it would improve the safety of workers and lead to greater production efficiency.

 

Argus shares the same mission and has teamed up with Anago to not only distribute their products in Australia and New Zealand but also to educate the primary food processing industry on the many benefits of having a highly skilled workforce who not only understand, but are able to maintain the sharpness of their primary cutting tool the humble knife.

 

People suffer a lot of pain and often don’t tell you. Then one day they decide its not worth it and stop showing up.

 

The Anago Knife Sharpness Tester allows you to measure the effectiveness of your current sharpening processes. Your Knife Trainer is able to identify who is capable of maintaining a sharp knife and who would benefit from some additional training, they can then work with specific staff to improve their technique.

How It Works:

The Anago machine runs the cutting blade through the genuine Anago test media and measures the cutting force required along the length of the blade. The machine then gives you a score for the overall blade and produceses an easy to understand graph that shows the sharpness of the blade along its entire length. This allows you to pinpoint exactly where the knife is being maintained or sharpened well and where it needs improvement.

Often it is found that the tip and heel of knives tend to be blunt which are the areas that do most of the cutting.  A score of 7.8 will pass the paper test and a score of 8.4 will pass the shave test.

What does it mean to have a sharp knife?

  • Significant reduction in applied cutting force required from the worker. This will decrease injuries caused by overuse or the knife slipping. Your workers expend less effort and are happier. Tests have shown a peak force of 4-6 times higher with a dull knife.

  • Improvement in Yield. With a sharp knife the worker can cut more accurately meaning you get less meat left on the bone and more weight in your high value cuts of meat. Customers have reported yield increases in excess of 1%

  • Improvement in speed. Test have shown that by using a sharp knife not only do you get a significant improvement in yield you also see speeds 15% slower when using a dull knife.

Significant productivity gains to be made by improving the base level of skill in your team

It is widely known that bottlenecks are a productivity killer. In meat processing you are working with people and can’t just speed up a machine to make the processing chain go faster. Often a major contributing factor to slow speed is a dull knife.   

If you can make improvements to an individuals skill level to bring them up to a base level, the impact on the whole team is significant.

By working to improve one individual, the teams productivity increases by 25%

Get in touch with us today to discuss how the Anago Knife Sharpness Tester can help you!