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Hi all,
I remember that spanish barber used to stropp the blades in a loop strop with red paste one side and black one on the other. One of them once tell me that they didn't need to honning the blades beacuse it was not necessary when using pasted stropps. Is it true at all?
Pasted strops are used to refresh your edge when the razor starts to tug. You shouldn't use the pasted strop after each use. Your regular strop will be good enough. No, a pasted strop doesn't replace a hone. Eventually your razor will need to honed. That will likely be a barbers hone or equivalent. Unless you have damaged your edge (like banging it against the faucet), you won't need to set a new bevel for a very, very long time.
A lot of factors go into how often you need to use a pasted strop or hone. Your beard, face, technique, and the razor itself all figure into that time period. Only experience will let you know when to use your pasted strop, or go back to the hone.
Yes it's true.Quote:
Originally Posted by fjbg2009
Not arguing the point as you know more about it than I do but..... wouldn't continually refreshing the edge on paste eventually thin out and weaken the edge ? I'm thinking that honing on stones gives me better control over how I leave my edges from the standpoint of the integrity of the bevel ?Quote:
Originally Posted by mparker762
Isn't a pasted strap in essence a leather hone?
So constantly resharpening the edge may lead to an edge roll or too fine of an edge to be comfortable.:thinking:
It could be that it is the shaving that thins out and weakens the edge while the pasted strop helps reform it :shrug:Quote:
Originally Posted by JimmyHAD
The theory is arguable but it is hard to discount the positive experience of barbers with decades' worth of satisfied customers. I've only been shaving with a straight razor for about a year, so I haven't been able to verify for myself whether I need any hones at all, but there sure are a lot of old "barber hones" out there, eh :)
I am no expert, but have been told by someone who is that for best results a paddle strop should be used for pastes as it will be less likely to round the edge. Hanging strops are too flexible for proper honing and a pasted strop is a form of honing.
I used to think so. AFAIK I'm one of the guys that started this idea that pastes weaken the edge, and if you look back in the archives I came up with a variety of elaborate theories to explain this. But I've since reevaluated that theory in light of some experimentation and no longer believe it's valid. Sometime back around the time of the "Grand Chronik Review" I took a couple of old razors and did hundreds of laps with them on a variety of pastes (diamond, Dovo Black, and chrome oxide) and substrates (leather-on-wood, bare wood, vellum-on-wood, and hanging linen and leather) and never really demonstrated to my satisfaction that high levels of pasted stropping actually degraded the edge. What I did find was that too much paste was bad, and too much pressure was bad, and on a pasted hanger too much slack was bad. But I never did find that hundreds or even thousands of laps on pasted strops were bad. One of the razors I sent out in the Chronik Review had over five hundred laps on chrome oxide on a hanging strop, and if the recipient noticed any problems he didn't deem it worth mentioning. My 7/8 W&B Concave grind had close to 800 laps on a variety of pastes, finishing up on the Dovo Black paste, and the only lasting effect was that it's too sharp to shave with comfortably.Quote:
Originally Posted by JimmyHAD
The only link I really found between pasted stropping and edge deterioration was that as the paste loads up with swarf then the draw tends to increase, which tends to cause you to increase pressure, which then which harms the edge. But this is an effect that occurs with unpasted strops as well (I can't stand high-draw strops like latigo for this reason). But absent that, I found that I could strop an edge on paste for many hundreds of laps and the edge remained sharp as ever. Using a non-compressible substrate like bare hardwood or vellum-on-tile makes this much more clear, since they're more resistant to pressure (with a full hollow, increasing pressure flexes the blade more than the substrate, which actually lifts the edge away from the paste)
The pasted hangers and even to some extent the leather-covered paddles all tended to cause some degree of arching in the bevels, but as long as you used consistent tension and consistent (and very light) pressure on the razor, this doesn't really cause any problems. If you think about it a slightly arched bevel is similar to a double or triple bevel - only continuous instead of stepwise. The problem comes in with a very heavily arched bevel which makes the final angle at the edge too steep. The knife sharpening guys have been doing the multi-bevel thing for years and from what I've read believe the multi-bevel edge is inferior to the smoothly arched edge, and the only reason to use a multi-bevel edge is because of the difficulty of achieving this on a knife without a continuous slack belt sharpening system.
Thanks so much for your interesting reply. That is the most valid explanation ever read about the matter.Quote:
Originally Posted by mparker762
Can you explain what you mean when you refer to "harm" to the edge that a paste may or may not cause? Do you mean a wire edge? I can produce wire edges which are evident when viewed under incandescent light with the unaided eye from using diamond pastes and chrome ox under certain conditions (depends on the razor/steel, etc). Such an edge can be wickedly sharp but can crap out mid-shave and be visibly ragged after the shave when viewed under magnification. Drawing that edge over the corner of a balsa strop will most often remove that burr but I brought this up because I have and can create a burr using pastes. Typically I find burrs/wire edges can be created using hanging canvas strops with 1 mic and .5 mic diamond sprays. I agree with you on the overpasting being bad since chrome ox has on occasion produced wire edges for me only when I've overpasted on balsa. Concentration seems to be key here as I performed an experiment last year using a small amount of dry chrome ox powder on newspaper over a lapped Chinese 12k hone TRYING to create a wire edge. After 100 passes each day for 7 days and 700 total passes with no wire edge, I was satisfied that the method and/or concentration of chrome ox did not create a burr.Quote:
Originally Posted by mparker762
Chris L
No not a wire edge. I was talking about the excessive arching that leads to a steep angle at the edge, or too much pressure which causes the pastes to coarsely. Just as with stones, if you use a lighter touch the abrasives cut more slowly and finely; use too much pressure and they cut fast and coarse and create a duller edge, even if the final angle is ok. The trick with pastes is that the more flexible or compressible your substrate is, the more careful you have to be about being consistent with your pressure (and tension on an hanger), because they tend to put more pressure on the edges of the bevel than the middle of the bevel, cutting those areas faster and leading to the arched bevel shape. A little too much slack and you've got a very steep cutting bevel and you may have to remove a lot of metal to get things back into shape so the pasted strop will contact the edge under normal circumstances. This may be another reason why pastes have gotten the reputation of only working for a little while - one slip in your technique and the bevel is so arched that it will take a bunch of laps to get the bevel back to where it was. Since stropping is so "easy" the obvious explanation is that the pastes aren't working anymore and it's time to hone, when really the issue was a slipup in your stropping technique. This is what I found when I went to a really hard incompressible substrate, that the pastes didn't "stop working" with lots of honing, even if I got a bit sloppy or careless.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris-L
I vaguely recall being worried about overhoned edges from pastes back when I first started, but I don't know if it was something I ever experienced myself or just heard about and repeated. But I don't think I've ever gotten a wire edge from pastes myself, and Verhoeven never seems to have gotten them either in his honing paper. So there may be some particular set of circumstances that cause this to happen with pastes. I'd be curious if you can fix this with a bit of pyramiding on the pastes. Although pyramiding is a bit more of a chore on pastes because of the cross-contamination issue.
In Belgium, many straight razor shavers use this method. There's a famous store in Antwerp ("De Koordenwinkel") that organizes shaving and honing courses. They teach what I believe to be more or less the unofficial Dovo method, using a progression of their green, red and black pastes. (roughly: 6, 3 and 1 micron - 4K-8K-16K).
From time to time the bevel is re-flatted on a Coticule with slurry.
This method creates good and sharp edges, that are shaveready from the red paste and upwards. I have used it for a while, and the only reason I started considering something else, is not because they lacked keenness, or because I got wire edges, but because the longevity of those edges was very poor for me. 3 shaves at the very maximum. Some people solve this by doing a few licks on the pasted strop before every shave. It works, but I worried about the steel removal, in the long run.
Another thing I found, is that no matter what, there's always a moment where the convexity becomes too "round". Even if you start out on a very taut loom strop, after a while the stropping looses efficiency. Loosening the adjustment screw for a bit of extra slack, gets it going again, but 2 or 3 touch-ups later, I always got tempted loosening the screw some more. At the same time, extra slack in the hanging strop needs to follow, which was very difficult to keep record of when rotating razors in various state of convexity.
In the end I started reading on SRP and took the honing route.
Can't say that I regret it. I sometimes still use CrO on a loom strop, very sparingly, only before the first test shave after honing, if the situation calls for it. Off the finishing hone, I expect a razor to be at "popping hairs" level, when probed with a HHT. When I strop that edge, I expect a clear shift in the direction of "felling hairs silently" on the same HHT. About 7 out of 10 times, I get that improvement with the clean leather strop. In the 3 remaining cases, I need 10 additional light laps on a taut CrO strop. I have not noticed the longevity issues from that practice.
I think it makes a big difference whether the edge is largely shaped in the stropping direction, or whether the fin is just a bit touched with an extremely fine abrasive.
But, as Mparker672 explained in such clear words, it certainly can be done, and some extremely keen edges can be put on a razor, far easier than can be done with hones. For as long as they last. That may largely depend on beard type, and maybe even on the razors. I didn't own a single stainless steel razor in my pasting days.
Bart.
Hi,
Thanks for your comments. Very good place to learning about straight razors and stuff. Some French friends of mine that shaving with cut throats agree with the methode of stropping with pasted looms instead of honning the blades with water stones and similar things. They hone their blades at first when get a new straight in a professional service and then they use the pasted loom strops only. They hone their straight on water stones no longer. It seems to be that european style are different that american one.
I have been buying quite a few razors from the French eBay lately, and many that I see listed there have a very distinct frown. In my mind, I have connected these frowns to excessive trips to a pasted strop over years of use, and too little honing. Anyone care to comment?
Most of the frowns I've seen have come from curved blades. Though I suppose if you used a narrow pasted strop or a narrow hone extensively (both of which seem common in europe), and weren't careful to distribute the wear evently, it could also cause this problem.