Thread: Hello, thank you and I have a question :)

Hi David and welcome to SRP...Great choices in hardware you have acquired or are thinking to do so in the near future. As for your questions:

Strop choice:
When I started out str8 shaving not long ago, I started with a premium IV (Talked it over with Don at SRP...based on my needs, he even recommended it as a perfect starter strop )...it's actually reasonably priced and for me, buying a good strop was an impetus to make sure I took extra steps to make sure I didn't do anything stupid or wrong...I was extra careful, and even as a starter strop, I only managed to put a very small nick at the end of the strop (and that was recently)...I made sure I went slow with it to get the angles and pressures right. It worked very well in my case and haven't looked back since.

Canvas choice:
based on Don's recommendation, I went with the webbed fabric as the second material choice. So, the leather/webbed fabric are my "clean" (i.e., no pastes) strops for everyday touch-ups for me.

Also based on Don's recommendation, I also got a second strop, which is "fabric-only" with wool felt on one side and webbed fabric on the other. The wool felt is sprayed with 0.5µ diamond spray and the webbed fabric painted with 0.5µ CrOx paste (green). This two-sided "fabric"-only strop is used once a month for a quick sharpening/touch-up to keen up and refresh the edge (when if I feel the blade pulls a tad)

Hope this helps,

Welcome to SRP David. I agree with Robert's post above. If you're careful a better quality strop should be fine. I like the webbed fabric myself though I do also use linen sometimes. Like Robert I reserve the wool felt for touch ups and mine has diamond spray applied to it.

Here is a good tutorial from the SRP Wiki help files in PDF format. It is a 1961 barber manual excerpt on honing and stropping and should be helpful getting you started on stropping correctly.

Thank you for your answers. It's very interesting. I haven't reached the part about sprays and paste yet, but I'm starting to get the idea. I was wondering though if the fabric only strop system with spray and paste was a viable replacement for honing or if you still needed to hone your razor once in a while.

Originally Posted by Danseph

Thank you for your answers. It's very interesting. I haven't reached the part about sprays and paste yet, but I'm starting to get the idea. I was wondering though if the fabric only strop system with spray and paste was a viable replacement for honing or if you still needed to hone your razor once in a while.

You will need to hone once in awhile...but, if you get really good, I have heard many going with just stropping (with or without pastes) for more than a year or two. Either way, honing will come in at some point in your str8 shaving career. It's another fun thing to learn, IMO. Jimmy (JimmyHAD) is a master honer, like Lynn. If you have any questions, he is a wealth of info . Call him the Encyclopedia Honica, if you will . If you don't care about learning honing, you always have a great option of sending to Lynn or someone else here on SRP...you will always get a shave ready str8 to use for months to come.

Originally Posted by Danseph

Given that this is my first strop, I understand that I shouldn't spend too much on it, but still get good quality. So should I opt for the regular Latigo leather or go for the Premium IV as some posts have suggested. I can put a little extra for the Premium IV, but my question is whether it is an overkill for a newby.

I have seen this advice many times and many mention that as a noob, you will nick up and destroy your first strop. I did not heed this advice and I have but one tiny nick in my first strop. I think that if you do enough research, ask enough questions and watch enough videos, you will not have problems and the "better" strop is not necessarily overkill for a newby.

Now, please do not hold me responsible if your brand new Premium IV looks like it got attacked by a vengeful badger.