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,