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Homemade Fabric Strop: Some Lessons Learned
I’ve recently been experimenting with pastes and while I know I could have gone the balsa or felt route, I got it in my head to make some relatively cheap fabric strops that, if they worked out, might be more of a long-term solution. In total I spent about $20 (Canadian monies) on all the components for enough to make three separate strops, though this of course doesn’t include the cost of the pastes themselves.
A big part of the project was just to experiment with different fabrics and modes of assembly. I definitely learned a lot doing this. Obviously you could use whatever materials you have handy and leather is an obvious option, but for this I kept it entirely to various webbings, including the tabs. No doubt a lot of folks out there will know all this already but I wanted to just share a few of my observations and lessons should anyone else want to give this a go some time.
I bought three different fabrics, each 50mm (2”) wide and 1 metre (~3’) long: one pure cotton webbing (blue), 1 polyester-cotton blend, and 1 nylon; the choice of colour was simply based on what was available to me at the time. Of these, the pure cotton is easily the softest, while the nylon had a distinctly zippy feel to it (think seat belt); the polyester-cotton blend was somewhere in-between. I’d be willing to use any of them as a medium for pastes but I’d be a bit hesitant to use the nylon webbing just on its own (though I know people do).
For this project, I used 50cm (~20”) of the blue cotton webbing for the stropping material and the green nylon for the tabs. Because the fabric is both woven and cut, I didn’t want the ends exposed and so folded the nylon material in on itself so that the cut ends were hidden; I used approximately 12cm (~4.75”) of material.
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The fabric unravelling is obviously a concern here, more so for the cotton than the nylon. At first I tried to shore things up by applying some superglue to the ends to hold things together, but I later found that even better was to [lesson 1] apply CA glue to the fabric first, let it dry, and only then cut it; this gives a very clean edge that will not unravel.
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It does discolour the fabric slightly, but since the ends are tucked under and hidden anyway this wasn’t a concern. Importantly, the fabrics respond very differently to CA: nylon takes a bit longer to cure whereas the cotton cured instantaneously and produced an intense exothermic reaction – so much so that some smoke was produced and it almost ignited: [lesson 2] be careful when applying CA glue to cotton!
If you don’t have any chicago screws handy or aren’t overly worried about disassembling the components one could easily glue and sew everything together, but I prefer them, both aesthetically and because their modular nature is very practical and something I’d want in a high quality strop. Also, I had chicago screws handy that I salvaged from some discarded restaurant menus.
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I used a rotating hole punch to make the holes; something that will be obvious to some people I needed to discover for myself: [lesson 3] place a scrap piece of material under the fabric you’re punching as it makes for much cleaner holes.
I found that getting all the punched holes aligned was actually one of my bigger issues. It didn’t really matter too much where the holes were placed (I inset the centre of the outside hole 1cm from the side edge and 1.5cm from the end, but that was fairly arbitrary), but because of all the folding it did matter that they lined up and for this eye-balling things was entirely insufficient and even using a tape or ruler to make out a location came with a margin of error. [Lesson 4] matching relative hole positions is both important and difficult. I found the best way was to [lesson 5] punch a hole in one corner of one of the tabs first and then use it as a template
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Since I had both tabs cut to length already, I kept flipping the one around to ensure the holes in all corners were in the same relative position, then with that one done I used it to complete the other.
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Not exactly an engineers dream approach, but it was simple to do and worked really well.
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As with the ends of the fabric material, I was a bit concerned unravelling around the punched holes being an issue. In my first attempts I actually applied some CA glue around the punch holes too. Unexpectedly, this greatly increased the width of the fabric as there was no longer any give. When there was no CA around the punched holes I could use chicago screws that were 7mm long, but once they were glued I had to go up to 12mm to get things to fit. In summary, [lesson 6] strengthening the punch holes with glue will add noticeable thickness to the strop tabs. One could use grommets here too, but they add a bit of works and will likewise make it thicker. All in all for this level of stress at least, [lesson 7] the fabric unravelling at the holes is not a huge concern.
The final result:
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Overall I'm very happy with how things turned out. For comparisons sake, here is another I made in more or less the same manner, this one, though, with the polyester-cotton blend as the stropping material:
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I hope this helps someone out there. I'm still learning a lot through this, so any suggestions or critiques are more than welcome!
Paul
