I haven't had any complaints about the strop itself. Like I said the only defects seem to be some workmanship mis-cuts on the handles (one part of the handle is cut so that the stitch line goes off the line of the handle). All in all it works fine, I just looked at all the pictures on the net at various vendor sites and saw all the IRSC strops have the horse head on them. I wondered why mine did not.

Thanks again for clearing this up for me.

BTW, I am getting somewhat better at stropping and haven't nicked my strop in a long time...well not real bad anyway