Thread: Paste on Leather

There are modern trends, but old-school barber's pasted strops may be more of a European tradition. In France, I've seen folks use pasted loom strops for the most part. My barber over there always runs a 3/8 near wedge over a severely slackened (or de-tensioned) small, pasted loom strop before cutting my hair with the 3/8.

If you want to experiment in this way, I would suggest starting off with some vegetable-tanned leather belting. Cut it to length with a utility knife and sand it with 80x, 120x, and 180x sandpaper (vacuuming off the dust after each grit) to give the surface some tooth, followed by an application of either Solingen red or black crayons, or both if you have two sanded pieces of leather. Otherwise, yes, I would not want to gunk up a nicely finished dedicated strop with paste.

I have a Tony Miller fast bridle leather strop and would never consider putting any paste or spray on it. However, I have made a number of bench strops by gluing vegetable tanned "tooling" leather to balsa or basswood that has been sanded flat. I use Elmers Extreme Glue Sticks to bond the leather and wood. The tooling leather and other supplies can be purchased from most hobby/craft stores. I usually purchase 8 1/2" x 10" squares and cut it into three pieces. You can experiment with both the smooth side and suede side of the leather to determine which you prefer.

There were multiple types of "Pastes" used back in the day


Lead, Ash, Talc, Iron Oxide, all kinds of things were used trying to push the edge

I have a lead pasted strop, that is a Scrupleworks extremely nice horsehide. if it goes on my razors why not a really good strop under the paste?, thinking about leading my Kanayama. as for the original question, the guys over on the far side of the ocean have been doing this longer than us and they use paste a lot. Tc

I use the Mastro Live CroOx paste on my SRD paddle strop English leather and it works great.