Thread: Homemade Fabric Strop: Some Lessons Learned

Nice looking work and write up.

For the Nylon I have just melted the cuts with a lighter to keep them from unraveling.

You could also glue the pieces together with like a rubber cement before punching the holes and then they will all be lined up easier.

Thank you everyone for your very kind words! It's funny, I only used the blue cotton because that's what was available, but I really like how it looks. I don't know how much of an issue it'll be, but the darker base could make it more difficult to tell the various pastes apart by colour alone, which really just means taking care to keep things labelled.

Using leather would definitely be an option for something like this and in many ways a lot easier than using the fabric. I had also thought about getting some faux snake leather for the tabs, which can be found in some really fun colours and patterns. If this was planning to go makes scores of strops that is probably what I'd do, but a big part of this was to keep costs down and use what was around as much as possible.

I don't know why I didn't think of gluing the folded tab ends together before punching the holes; Tim, it's a great suggestion and one I wish I'd thought of myself. This morning I gave it a try and made some new tabs using this approach. Previously, when I glued the ends to keep things from unraveling I used thin CA so it would deeply penetrate, but to glue the folds together I used a medium thickness (Gorilla brand) super glue, both to keep the glue closer to the surface and to give me a bit more time to get things arranged. With the folds glued I pressed them in the vice to give it a nice crease and keep things flat. It was definitely much easier and looked a bit cleaner too, so [lesson 8] if you're using fabric tabs, glue the folded ends first and then punch the holes (and so ignore lesson 5 ).

Now that really dresses it up. Even neater looking caps now.