Thread: Honing with a strop.

LOL I agree.

So I ran away to get married and acquire all of my equipment in the USA.

Anyhow ... Thanks for the replies guys. I am going to give this a try over the next couple of months.
Will let you know the results!!

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

That fellow must have forearms like Popeye the sailor man.

I don't see why it couldn't be done, but in the era of fast cutting and fairly inexpensive synthetics, I'd wonder why someone would want to do it.

Haven't there been several folks on here who mentioned that they knew someone who shaved all their life with straight razors and used nothing but various pasted strops to keep them going?

Not sure why you would think the surface texture would do anything to an edge whatsoever, except perhaps ruin it if it gets too craggy. Leather is leather. Unless you end up embedding some grit into the leather during the roughing up phase, but then you are simply talking about yet another abrasive strop.

By all means give it a go, but my armchair theorising it telling me that you'll probably only influence the draw by doing this, and that any edge effects will be because you failed to adequately remove embedded grit from the "landscaping" agent.

James.

Hey

So I tried making the leather more abrasive by roughening it up. It didn't work. The leather removed less metal proportionate to the amount of finishing I removed from the surface of the leather. I think that the silicates on the surface of the leather are very important in stropping. I am not the first to say this, it was just in my head, so I typed it.

With this in mind I am going to try to introduce more silicates into the strop using potassium silicate to see what that does

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Not sure why you would think the surface texture would do anything to an edge whatsoever, except perhaps ruin it if it gets too craggy. Leather is leather. Unless you end up embedding some grit into the leather during the roughing up phase, but then you are simply talking about yet another abrasive strop.

By all means give it a go, but my armchair theorising it telling me that you'll probably only influence the draw by doing this, and that any edge effects will be because you failed to adequately remove embedded grit from the "landscaping" agent.

James.