Thread: Verhoeven Paper Question

It may take more laps than that. Remember we're talking about reversing a process that takes a week or two to dull an edge, during which time it has recieved a thousand or more laps on the leather... So the lap counts needed to falsify these theories may well be that high.

It's also important to start out with clean leather - crud and dust on the leather will affect the results. OTOH if a clean strop doesn't abrade, but a dirty one does abrade then that is useful knowledge - maybe it's the corrosion that comes off the razor and embeds in the leather that winds up providing the abrasive power - iron oxide is a popular abrasive in the form of red jewelers rouge, which would both falsify the original theory (untreated leather is abrasive) and provide us with a new theory (leather with iron oxide in it is abrasive).

I've tried to remove one source of variability from my own experiments by using a leather/linen paddle strop instead of a hanging strop. Given the high lap counts that are needed it's simply too easy to make a mistake at some point along the way, just because you get tired and this makes it easy to get careless. I got mine from Tony Miller, and I would recommend that anybody attempting to do these stropping experiments do the same.

At the moment I'm in the middle of what I anticipate will be a multi-year-long experiment to see if the sag in a hanging strop is important to the effectiveness of the strop and how it affects the lifetime of the edge, by using two different razors, stropping one with a horsehide/linen hanging strop and another with a horsehide/linen paddle strop.