Thread: Interesting article

I would also like to add my thanks to you for this article - if I can figure out how one goes about doing such a thing.

Now the "thanks" button is showing up on my screen, so thanks.

My dear Alan,

Thank you for posting this most illuminating article, and thank you all, gentlemen, for your commentary.

On a personal note, I must also compliment Mr. Martin's fine writing way back in 1931.

Regards,
Obie

Here is another article on keeping your razors sharp.. DE and SE. If I remeber correctly it's from the late 1920s:

I've been very concerned lately, and coming across more and more support that strops are supposed to have a "very mild abrasive" in them. Troubling, but I think this may be a good idea. I've been using graphite impregnated into my strops for almost a year I think.

Works very well, and makes me wonder if we are still missing a piece of the honing/stropping puzzle.

wow, an interesting article it is! reccomending a stropping action with a bit of a slack in the strop is unusuall, though it makes sence. I will try that for a while...

Alan, I remember reading in some babrber's manuals that the strop with abrasive paste is reccomended for usage, but only after good bit of a practice with regular strop. Also, in the earlier days here, putting paste on a strop is always reccomended, and my friend was using his DOVO Prima Rindler pasted with DOVO black (or red, i forgot) for 25 years, and honing his 4-5 razor rotation rarely...

cheers,
Nenad

ok, re-reading all this stuff has made me more confused. The original Martin article we looked at refutes the saw-tooth theory of a razor's edge, instead saying that the steel consists of fibers which are "bent over and crushed backward" during shaving. Therefore, stropping bends these fibers back in place and removes corrosion (via light abrasion).

Then this article MisterA posted also says the edge consists of steel fibers, which are bent back by shaving. But then he compares these fibers to saw teeth, saying stropping bends them back into place (similar to Martin), but that it provides no abrasion.

Soooo...what the hell is the difference between steel fibers and saw teeth? All the microscope images show a jagged edge (be it from crushed 'fibers' or corrosion). If there are indeed fibers which are bent, then it would seem Boon's argument would be valid, saying that stropping after shaving could break off these bent fibers.

I checked the date, and it isn't from the late 1920s.. It is from July 1935. Popular Mechanics Magazine. Here's the cover :

And here is some more articles related to stropping. These are from 1920-1924 :

To make things more confusing I will post this article from Popular Science Monthly, March 1916 :