Thread: Old-school stropping vs modern stropping.

I remember a few years ago doing an experiment and found that the longest I could go between stroppings was pretty close to the number of shaves I could get from a disposable before I tossed it.

Made sense to me . . .

Originally Posted by VeeDubb65

And second, there seem to be a lot of references to using mild abrasive materials like chalk, graphite and rouge on your regular every day strop.

I'm one of the guys that has talked about this, but I've got a lot of strops and only a few are pasted. I enjoy experimenting with various flavors of strops and pastes.

Originally Posted by VeeDubb65

Personally, a strop with no abrasives used every day, and a barber hone once a month seems to do a great job for me, but I'm curious if anybody has tried using only a pasted strop, and only using it to refresh the edge every few shaves, and if so, what sort of results they saw.

Plain strops work fine for me too, I've got several razors that have around 4 months on them with only an unpasted strop, no barber hones or pastes.

I find that the mild pastes make things go faster, but I also think that plain unpasted linen or cotton gives a sharper edge than even very fine pastes. The tradeoff is that I suspect the mild pasted strops give the shaver an inexpensive and easy-to-learn way to keep their razors going essentially indefinitely.

I've heard of the stropping-every-few-days routine, but every time I've tried it my blades deteriorate extremely quickly; after the third day it's too late for a barber hone. This may be due to my acidic skin; I've found that if I take a razor and shave with it once and put it aside for two days, and take another razor and shave with it for three days straight, then at the end of that period they will both be equally dull. I may have to try this again though to see if vaseline will help.

When a razor begins to tug I do 20 laps on a CrO pasted strop to refresh the edge. When that doesn't appear to work I use my Nortons 4K/8K followed by the pasted strop. This works for me. I don't own a barber's hone I shave six days a week (Sundays I give my face a break) and have a 5-razor rotation. So I can go for several weeks before having to refresh the edge. One thing to keep in mind is that each razor will be different so there is no set time. But if you like a periodic preventative maintenance approach you can do them all at the sime time.