Quote Originally Posted by pjrage View Post
Another thing that helps me is to think of "driving" the spine along the leather and just letting the edge follow along skimming the leather like a tail or something. You shouldn't be focusing on torquing the edge down or focusing on dragging the edge - that will come naturally. Look at it this way ... you'd rather do a pass where ONLY the spine touches and you don't even hit the edge than a pass where the spine lifts and only the edge touches.
This is similar to the mental "breakthrough" I had while learning to strop. My difficulty was getting the "flip" right. When I started thinking of it as rolling the spine under the blade instead of flipping the blade up over the spine it all fell in place. This kept the spine leading through all phases of the flip and no more nicks!

I hadn't thought about it until now, but that was part of an overall idea of stropping the spine with the edge following along for the ride (mostly).