Thread: Resurfacing a leather strop, you can do it

I have a couple of leather strops that I made. The finished side of the leather is nice and smooth and makes a very good strop, but the backside is pretty shaggy. I wanted to CO paste it and use it for quick touchups to augment my paddle strop. The grain was way to coarse to do that, it would roll/chip the edge in its current condition.

So I got to thinking, how and I resurface that? I need to shave down the very top of the leather while keeping it level, hmmmmm . I need to plane it down but I am sure not going to try running it through my wood planer, I need to cut it down but by hand. Well, why not hand plain it! So I took the hardware off the strop, stretched it out and clamped it to my work bench. I got out my small super sharp hand plain (you could shave with my planes), reset the blade depth and proceeded to plane the backside of the strop. Worked like a charm.

[FONT='Calibri','sans-serif']I just thought I would share, just in case someone else needs to resurface a strop, plain it down with a very sharp hand plane.[/FONT]

Wonderful idea!

VERY cool idea; thanks for sharing (committing this to memory......there we go).

Chris L

Very Cool! Can you get a close up shot of the leather? How smooth is it?

When I rubbed in the chromium oxide it roughed up the surface a little, but it is still smoother than before. I will get a photo of it later today. I would say it is between smooth finished leather and swade. There is a little nap to the surface.

Cool beans. That is what I though it was from the pic, but couldn't really tell. Again, great job!

Heh, handplaning the leather wouldn't have been an obvious answer for me. You're obviously thinking outside the box!

Just a thought.....

Couldn't a Norton flatting stone work just as well?

LIMIT

I'll bet a little sandpaper on top of that and you would have it as smooth as the other side

I use an orbital sander with 150 grit paper.