Thread: To strop or not to strop

Starting with 1 micron is my preference, im looking at one of tony's 4 sided paddles and intend really to use only 3 of the sides for pastes and reserve the 4th for general stropping. The reason for this is that my current strop has basically been pitted to death over the 8 months ive been learning to strop and as such i want a decent strop to start from afresh with. Getting a wicked sharp edge is my current goal as i have awfully thick hair, atm my 10k hone leaves the edge more than adequate for shaving (on my Genco and Puma at least i get an excellent HHT sharp edge) but i still feel that we can go sharper. I struggle a lot with my beard growth making the razor jump as i shave and this often leaves me with a few tiny blood spots and slight irritation from where it reconnects and takes a tiny chunk out, the effect is minimal but i have both the time and money to spend on getting that perfect nirvana shave. Hell i think i deserve that perfect shave after spending nearly 15 years loathing shaving because of the crap shaves that cartidge razors give on my beard, until i took up a straight i used to refer to shaving as 'mans time of the morning'.

I think your current plan sounds good. A pasted strop with 1µ, 0.5µ, 0.25µ pastes and a plain side would be just fine. Since you have a japanese 10k, the 3µ is just superfluous. This is more or less an educated guess, but the 3µ paste will probably do the work of your 6k and the 1µ about the work of your 10k (roughly around there).

Usually once I'm done on the norton 8k I'll move to my pasted strop at 0.5µ and then finish with a few strokes on 0.25µ. Sometimes I might use the 1µ before that, but mostly only a few strokes.

I have a genco as well and I gave it the full treatment with the paddle strop (several passes @ each paste). After that, it was incredibly sharp; more than any other of my razors. If you stropping technique is good, I have no doubt you'll be able to chase down that wicked sharp edge you're after.

And with that i am convinced.