Thread: To strop or not to strop. (Howard Schechter) Videos

Aloha!

If I were honing up to 30k, I'd probably not be a fan of stropping either. I currently hone to 10k, and have a 12k coming soon. But that will be it. I'm stopping at 12k. Huge jump from 12 to 30k. Obviously.

Yet, from all of the studying I've done, the blade edge is like a comb under high power magnification, and stropping helps put the teeth of the comb back into alighment. This is over-simplifying things, but that's the simple image in my mind. So even if I were 30k honing on a finish stone, I'd probably do some quick stropping to put the blade back into "alignment" for lack of a better way to say it.

Howard is, IMO, one of the masters. When he speaks, I listen. He's probably forgotten more about the art of honing and stropping than I will ever know. I do agree that some wet shavers try and use stropping to continue the honing process, and that's not what strops were intended to do. I actually agree with his lack of adding paste to a strop. And notice he's not rotating the razor on the spine when he strops. He's rotating blade EDGE down. Interesting. I remember my father's barber (when I was a young kid going to the barber shop with my dad) stropped this way, with the blade edge down as he rotated. And he stropped VERY fast. Speed of lightning. As long as you are not "rolling" the blade on the strop with the edge down, it's OK. But most of us have been taught to rotate on the spine, not the edge. That was burned into my stropping technique from the get-go.

-Zip

Stropping re-aligns the edge, so conversely insufficient stropping also would lead to needing honing sooner due to degradation of the edge.

I do not believe that stropping causes any harm to an edge. The degree of convexing of an edge by leather is trivial and the benefits far outweigh the supposed detriment.