Thread: Buying Vintage Hones?

Yes, I should've made it clear that for effective maintenance you need fabric component strop, not just leather. There are some old threads with experiments on the difference the fabric component makes.

I have tons of strops but have been using essentially one of them (plus a vintage kanayama shell for 10-20 laps at the end). The fabric component on it is cotton, that is treated with something waxy - that's the most common vintage strop as far as I can tell. This one started brand spanking new looking and over the first month started graying and now few years later is fairly black. That's the iron oxide from the razors I've stropped and it seems a good thing on a strop. I am not sure what is currently the dominant abrasive, the iron oxide or whatever treatment the strop started with, but if I'm to bet I'd say they're likely comparable.
I've also used plain vintage cotton, linen and few different treatments and they all work.

Originally Posted by gugi

Yes, I should've made it clear that for effective maintenance you need fabric component strop, not just leather. There are some old threads with experiments on the difference the fabric component makes.

I have tons of strops but have been using essentially one of them (plus a vintage kanayama shell for 10-20 laps at the end). The fabric component on it is cotton, that is treated with something waxy - that's the most common vintage strop as far as I can tell. This one started brand spanking new looking and over the first month started graying and now few years later is fairly black. That's the iron oxide from the razors I've stropped and it seems a good thing on a strop. I am not sure what is currently the dominant abrasive, the iron oxide or whatever treatment the strop started with, but if I'm to bet I'd say they're likely comparable.
I've also used plain vintage cotton, linen and few different treatments and they all work.

I think there's a fairly large difference between the old strops. I've seen some that are pretty much black with razor residue. I don't have a great picture of mine, but I snapped it with my camera last night, so it can be seen how dark it is. There are two things contributing to it not being dark - it's so hard that the tops of the linen that contact the razor are smoothed, but most of the surface is not touching any part of the razor, just those tips. And, of course, because the abrasive that is used is gentle and toned down even more by being suspended away from the edge in wax.

At any rate, I've gotten three linens now, haven't used the other two yet but was careful to pick this style with little metal on them because I'm stingy with the razors I'd like to have. What's surprising to me is how well this strop keeps an edge in shape and for how long despite the fact that there's very little metal left on the surface of it.

As I mentioned previously, this is probably about 50 uses worth of swarf, maybe somewhere in the range of 1500 pretty heavy strokes (because of the strop stiffness, the strokes have to be pretty forceful or most of the edge will never touch the linen).