Thread: Some thoughts on stropping

Bigspendur- Excellent points!

I'm a little in a hurry so I'll have to come back and re-read and think about this stuff a little more but this morning proved some pretty dramatic results

I shaved again this morning, and the results were dramatically poor. The edge deterioration was pretty noticible. This shave rated around a 2 out of 10. Some thoughts I came across as I worked with the materials I had available.

The edge, once damaged via excessive stropping, was corrected with one, and only one pass on a wetted thumbnail. Four passes caused irreversible damage and one pass on a dry nail also caused irrepairable damage (nothing I could do with a strop helped).

The blade was shaveable, but was left feeling very poor in quality, kinda like it would if you were new to honing and thought you had it down already.

I felt forced to hone it to return it to its pristine glory.

I have concluded already, that it is possible to overstrop. I have also concluded that it is impossible to determine where this is as several different dressing compounds and strops all behaved differently. And to add to BigSpendurs comment I also found that it may in deed be possible to have too much draw on a strop, causing edge damage from fewer strokes.

Re-reviewing the post from Scott which was so instrumental in helping me with all this it does in fact say in the last paragraph . . .

"most razors are spoiled by too much stropping".

So I think most of this playing around merely confirmed what you other guys already knew. For me, I did pick up a litte new info.

I'll repost the link just for any readers ease in finding it. Click on the 1922 link:

http://straightrazorpalace.com/compo...d,19/Itemid,3/

I will likely continue to play around a little with this idea.

Originally Posted by dylandog

I'm feelin' pretty good this friday night, so I'm just gonna say –

Alan you rock. You're a freakin' scientist. We all benefit from your endless crazy experiments.

I'm still using your strop-on-ashed-linen thing –

and I've been shaving monogamously with the same damn monserrat razor for two months straight and haven't had to hone it yet. The thing seems to get better and better.

I know that's nothing for honedright and a few other guys, but for a guy that never got more than 7 shaves out of a razor before I call it results.

Happy weekend.

Thanx! you are in a good mood! That is really cool. Stay tuned, as soon I'm thinking about posting "Some thoughts on honing" . . .

Neat stuff. Nothing envigorates an old field like challenging the preconceived "wisdom" and running your own tests.