Thread: No Stropping Before A Shave?

Dean, that was a great write up.
You offered many valid points.
Nevertheless, I would like to make one remark. I often wonder about the sharpness of razors. I think that in the old days, they were generally less sharp than the edges used by many of us today. In the old days, a boy learned to shave with the sharpness his father managed to get with the hones that were available. What the blade offered in sharpness needed to be taken as such, and where the sharpness left something to be desired, shave technique had to make up for it. It takes a tad more pressure than a sharper blade, the shaving angle needs to be more precise, scything motions perfected, skin stretching mastered. The boy had a light beard that became coarser together with his growing avidness as a shaver.
Today, Lynn, or another honemeister, sends a razor to a grown boy, that has the modern world's patience, and indeed: in his inexperienced hands, the razor does not remove whiskers as he expected it would. The razor is declared not shaveready (while in fact it is the grown boy that is not quite shaveready) and the honemeister declared a fraud (of course no newbie puts it in his first post so bluntly, but we've all read between the lines of such posts written in utter frustration).
My point is that seasoned shavers are tweaked in with their edges, and that shavereadiness is a variable, in function of one's beard, skills, habits and preferences. (How about that, Nelson?)

About stropping. I'd like to test my edges, TPTs, HHTs, mowing armhair, I don't care. I am pretty sure that stropping an edge, even on the very first time after it is honed, affects all those tests. I've never shaved without stropping, so I can't tell about that "test". It is clear to me that stropping does something, and that an edge should always be stropped, whether Glen does it up front (and oils the blade), or Glen's customer does it before the shave. I have one exception, and thats when I finish on a CrO-pasted strop (can't speak for diamond compounds), but even then, I strop on leather as well, although I don't notice the difference.

Bart.

I have shaved a few times directly off all my natural hones.

Lynn, are you saying there should be no difference between a fresh edge from the hone, and that same (similar) one stropped on the first shave? I guess there is no direct comparison, but the second stropped shave always seems noticeably smoother to me

Is it fair to say that unless the razor comes right out of the hone, one should always:

1) Always strop before shaving.

2) The stropping sequence is dictated by personal preference.

3) One should lead with the spine when stropping.

4) The blade should be parallel to the strop.

5) There should be some light pressure (not just the weight of the blade) applied to the blade onto the strop.

6) Stropping should be done covering the whole blade and with "confident" strokes.

Al raz.