Thread: Making a Paddle Strop

One man's trash is another man's treasure. Or in this case, my trash is about to become treasure.

A week or two back I bought a "new" strop on ebay that actually had a massive gouge (yes gouge, not cut or scrape- I am mystified how it was put there) long story short I could return it ("Oh! We thought that was from normal wear and tear.") BUT.... shipping was $10 and would be close to that in the other direction and so I paid $30 and would have to pay another $10 to get $20 back... and I got swamped with other shit... so I never returned it. The rest of the leather and linen is AMAZING though.

So I'm gonna cut the strop handles and ring off, and cut it at the gouge and make a paddle from it. My question is, if I have CeO and CrO that I want to start using, is it better to paste them on linen or on buffed horse hide? I envision making a 4-sider, with two linen, two leather if leather is better, or three linen one leather (I have a yard of genuine Belfast linen), or should I include balsa, or what should I do?

In summary, if I had two sides, what combo of leather/linen/balsa should it be?
What if I had 4 sides?

Well, horsehide is kind of rare nowadays (or at least expensive), so I wouldn't paste that, or at least have one length of horsehide unpasted. I'd just put the CrO on the other length of horsehide if there are two.

One thing you might want to do- I don't know what linen is like- but I used canvas to make some paddle strops and found that you really needed to wash it a few times to get the best results. Unwashed it was really rough and unpleasant to use. It wasn't preshrunk.