Thread: Negative pressure stropping

I have been playing a bit with my razors and I brought out an old barber hone recently. Before, when my razors were reasonably sharp this barber hone did little, but now that the blades are really pretty sharp already this barber hone is putting some wicked edges on my razors. Sharp!

So, now, what to do about it? As you may have realized these hyper sharp edges are a little more challenging to strop than your average bear. They require either more experience or skill. Well I'm not into professing either of those because I shave a 4 am and I've learned that stropping at speed is better than not, so . . .

I have also found that for a very sharp blade, negative pressure, or a slight lifting is also effective for stropping. I have described this when honing but thought I would mention that it works really well with stropping too.

In stropping with negative pressure your lifting a little as you strop. The sensation is that you are cupping the razor in your hand and lifting slightly at the bicep. With a touch of speed and a sense of lightness you can circumvent the damage of any errors because of the extra light contact. This is of course accomplished with a strop parallel to the floor at about elbow height. That is important, but might be adaptable.

I was getting some incredibly great shaves over the last few days with this process and it occured to me that I should call this "stropping a honemeister blade" since it works so well for extremely good honing work. I discovered that I needed to either; become more skilled at stropping, or develop a technique that would allow for some mistakes . . . I chose the later route and its working very well.