I hope it is not just me thinking like this but I don't understand how stropping seems to get so hard for some people. If you can push the salt & pepper shaker out of the way to set your plate down on the kitchen table or pull the salt & pepper toward your plate at the kitchen table to spice your food, why can't people strop a razor ?

The pictures that are magnified I could not determine what they were with out reading about it . I thought the first was some kind of dermal layer of skin and the second was a pound or two of clay in an art class. They are to magnified to help me unless I was looking to see how the carbon atoms bind together to make up the steel I honestly couldn't tell what was coating and what was steel.