Quite interesting, I don’t have teak but I have used Hinoki and Maple end grain, while they might be better, I did not notice them to be 10 times better than HDPE board, consider the silica content presented it shouldn’t be.
In this context, abrasion wear on the edge from a slicing motion. white #2 steel, which has as little resistance to this kind of wear as you're gonna find. I have other boards as well.
I don’t know man. You check for a wire edge or something? Maybe when you cut on the teak, it kind of pulls off the wire edge or any remaining burr vs on the other boards where it can just fold a wire edge over.
Have you tried cutting food after testing the edge on a board? Maybe a tomato or a couple peppers? I like a good paper towel test as much as the next guy, but cutting paper towel only tells you so much.
Cutting a free hanging paper towel tells you a lot more about the fine edge than a bess test does. For one thing it's a "systemic" check, it shows how the whole system functions rather than one sub mm section of the edge any given time. All that test really measures is how narrow the apex is at the given segment being tested. A dull knife will still cut through food mostly just fine. You can dull the same hollow ground kato knife I'm using for this test on a piece of glass and the totally dull edge would still basically slice copy paper and go through ingredients because of geometry. In order to shave hair or cut a hanging paper towel you need a fine edge.
At this point I have 100% faith in my conclusions and I'd challenge anyone would show otherwise. I've run it over and over with identical results. I've mish-mashed, doing 10 cuts into the wood, edge is fine, two into the rubber and it's wrecked. I've fully resharpened between tests, I've also just stropped the fine edge back to life between tests. The reason I'm using white #2 is because unlike something like say vg10, making just a handful of cuts into the rubber board will render the fine edge totally useless. VG10 has vastly more resistance to this kind of abrasive wear, will withstand a lot more of it before it shows the same kind of visual or appreciable deterioration.
The issue here isn't a burr, but I get it. Most people on the internet, including those who claim to "freehand sharpening for 40 years" show rudimentary if any skill at all. Most people really suck at sharpening knives, freehand or not, not sure why that it is. I'm a pretty useless person, but even freehand sharpening was not difficult to learn and even master. It's not like learning a musical instrument. Sit down for a couple hours in one day and you can have a foundation to build on. Just to be clear for the sake of tests I'm not freehand sharpening the knives, I'm just making a point about why I can understand why you might assume "oh it's just a burr."
The issue here is marketing claims being taken at face value then becoming basically universally accepted facts by a community. It's just taken for granted, yeah rubber boards = edges last longer. Do the makers of these products even make such claims? I don't think they do. I think someone on youtube just decided that's how they felt, made a video and now everyone repeats these claims like they're the word of god. Only problem is there is zero evidence to support the claim.
Rubber boards maybe make sense in a professional setting, a restaurant which is burdened by regulations, legally mandated rules that prohibit using something like a wooden board. In that case it might make sense to use something like this when compared to hard plastic, especially if you're going chopping style cutting, and particularly with brittle hard Japanese knives. For home cooks these products are frankly terrible. They're expensive. They're heavy. They stain easily. They don't clean up easily. They aren't very convenient, most probably aren't dishwasher safe. And not least of all, the excessive abrasion wear they cause as I have demonstrated (to myself at least).
If I sound annoyed it's because I was one of these idiots who thought oh yeah, youtube guy says so. Must be true. Let's go ahead and spend $300 on some of that. The fact that I was able to observe the abrasive wear happening and that this isn't yet widely understood by "the community" is what compelled me to say something about it. If you are someone considering a rubber board because you have been led to believe it will make your edges last longer, I just want to say, think again. Watch videos of these things in use where you can see that doing rocking cuts on rubber boards is basically impossible due to friction. That same high friction is on the surface is likely what's abrading away the fine edge of your knives so quickly.
