Thread: Stropping on Felt without diamond spray?

Is it possible to use felt as your daily linen component of your strop, if it remains unpasted with the diamond spray?

I know that felt is regularly used with the diamond spray as a medium to touch up an edge, but how effective is it without the spray?

The reason I ask, is that I recently bought this strop off of ebay:

Leather Straight Razor Strop 28" Long x 3" Wide, New! - eBay (item 120565019756 end time May-05-10 19:37:48 PDT)

The linen component is a dense felt.

I am hoping this linen component is more satisfactory to me that than the linen/ canvas of my Illinois/ Bismark strop.

Thanks,

John.

I haven't done it myself, I use mine with the spray but I've read posts by guys who strop on the clean felt and say it is effective. Give it a try and see how it compares and let us know.

Originally Posted by michiganlover

Is it possible to use felt as your daily linen component of your strop, if it remains unpasted with the diamond spray?

I know that felt is regularly used with the diamond spray as a medium to touch up an edge, but how effective is it without the spray?

The reason I ask, is that I recently bought this strop off of ebay:

......snip...

You are asking the right question at the right time since you
cannot remove abrasives from a strop.

Try it as is without tinkering with either surface.
Giving it some time to break in....

If you decide to paste it start very fine with something
on the order of 0.25 or 0.5 microns. Diamond,
CeOx (white), CrOx(green).... you can up the ante
to a more aggressive paste if those are too fine
but you cannot remove coarse grits and go finer....

As for the choice of grit size, a lot may depend on how
your touch up/ finishing hone prepares the edge for your strop.

There is felt and there is felt, my guess is that it should do fine....

Just to clarify, I am not intending on using the felt part of this stop for touch up duties. I have "bench strops" consisting of felt/ diamond spray, and balsa/ chromium oxide for that purpose.

I am intending on leaving the felt untouched, and will likely never apply any sort of abrasive paste to it.

I did a search, and couldn't find any chat about using just the felt, minus a diamond spray. Nor could I find any chat about using it as a replacement for the "linen" component of the strop.

As I understand it, felt is slightly abrasive on it's own, so I would imagine using it daily would likely provide some benefit to the edge.

John,

I have wondered the same thing myself.

Try it and see; your results would be most interesting to us all

Have fun !

Best regards

Russ

John,

I use a SRD felt strop for my daily use before stropping on leather with no problems to mention. I use my linen charged with CrOx for touch ups then rinse, dry and strop on leather.

Also, for me, and just me, when I'm done shaving I will rinse and wipe my razor off but I don't feel comfortable wiping down to the edge so I'll do a couple of laps on my felt to help dry it off and then store until the next shave.

I hope this helps.