Thread: Where to get a good STR8 on a Budget?

Originally Posted by Spasoje

can you recommend me a good strop reasonably priced? and will i need all those pastes and goo's for it too?

Sorry - I have always made my own strops and I'm not much help. I'm sure others here will offer better advice. Goo, no. Maybe later for paste and goo - not critical getting started. Thing with strops is, there're easy to slice when you're getting started. Go cheap, go slow and practice with a butterknife to get the feel and the motion before you start slapping razor to leather is my best advice.

While you're practicing get your razor honed to shave ready by a pro. First shave, don't strop it before you shave and know the feel of a well honed and well stropped blade.

Lots of threads here about strop use and technique, too. Good luck!

What everybody else said. There is a learning curve with SR shaving and razor maintenance. Perhaps the first thing you should do is to learn how to tell if a razor is "shave ready". Sharpness tests can be subjective, but you must know how to tell when a blade is sharp enough to provide you with a good shave. The next step in maintaining your edge is learning how to strop. Lots of resources out there to help with this, the "Library" section of this board is a gold mine of great info; YouTube can be another good one.

There is no single huge secret in learning to straight shave, there are a great many very small ones.

It seems you have a few different issues happening here
Blade rusting can be as simple as it not being properly dried after use, this is one area that really needs close attention to stop rust - you could try using a hair dryer to really dry out tricky places like the pivot area, don't get the area too hot though. A light coat of oil applied carefully with a Qtip (save cutting your fingers on the edge) after this will help a lot to prevent further rusting.

Dulling of the edge seems to indicate a stropping problem - I would suggest looking at a number of stropping videos here on SRP. One that helped a lot when i was learning a lot is done by member AF Davis, he explains what he is doing very well IMO. Video here http://straightrazorpalace.com/strop...ing-video.html There are many other good videos to look at to help with your technique so check as many as you like to get a better idea of what is best for your razor.

For honing my best suggestion is to send it to a pro to get that shave ready edge feeling again.

In regard to a good quality strop you could certainly pay a lot of money for one, but the risk of cutting it by accident in the early learning stages is quite high. As said by member showmeshiner - Larry from whipped dog razors (google search this) has a decent poor mans strop that I still use today and it does a good job keeping my razor edges in good shape. He can also supply a full set of basic shaving equipment for a very reasonable price range.

The choice as they say, is up to you - whatever you decide there are plenty of people happy to assist with any questions you have.