Quote Originally Posted by AFDavis11
The black ice is an optical lighting effect that looks just like a keen sharpened razor, like in the attached pic. I don't have a pic of my blade but on mine it is close to the pic with some heavy random cut lines in it at weird intervals. When I strop on leather I get thousands of added grit line marks all over the blade and it looks like a cross hatch pattern. The cross hatch is so close together that it looks like a single pattern not a cross hatch at all. Like it was stropped with steel wool. I'll start doing some more experimentation. I replicate the same angle on the microscope each time. I can manuever it to look directly into the edge and I see more cuts reflected but after I strop I see WAY more cuts. It is exactly the same edge I see when I put a DE razor under the microscope. Smooth without grit striations. Again, just like the attached pic of a keen razor, this is accomplished without stopping on leather, only on balsa.
I had a response to this that didn't seem to save.

An edge can't look like black ice unless it's covered with something. The picture you showed had bad lighting. An edge cuts because of the fin ("microserrations"), which is formed where the scratch lines reach the end of the blade. In other words, without scratch lines, there's no fin. Here's a 200x microscope picture of a razor honed with a 12K stone. Notice the scratch lines?

A leather strop can't produce scratch lines if it has no paste on it. It can remove material which is covering the scratch lines. It can't dull an edge unless the strop is not taught and rounds the edge or unless something from the strop gets into the fin and gunks it up.

One thing is for sure: the strop did not produce scratch lines in an edge that didn't have them before.

DE blades have scratch lines, but they are perpendicular to the edge. They're very prominent at 60x. Try moving the light around