Thread: StropTober: Beginning Oct 1st 2012

Originally Posted by SixNipples

Hard to tell, but in your back pass (toward your body), is the spine slightly up and off the strop?

I noticed that when I was doing the flip on the backpass. My scales were loose and were flopping around so for some reason thats what I was doing to compensate. I tightened the pins and I don't see the spine coming off like that now . Amazing what you see yourself doing on video. This is going to be an excellent learning experience. My stropping has improved alot in past couple weeks simply by practicing that "finger flip" AFDavis showed on his video.

I did a test run of a stropping video today, and while the video quality was good, I saw that the angle wasn't as useful as it could have been. If you do this, you should probably try a test run.

Originally Posted by DFriedl

I did a test run of a stropping video today, and while the video quality was good, I saw that the angle wasn't as useful as it could have been. If you do this, you should probably try a test run.

I did that too and noticed that I was angling the strop away from the camera (stropping surface turned slightly toward me) and it wasn't at all clear. That's a big reason why my stropping looks a bit hesitant at times in mine - I kept checking whether I had the thing flat.

Camera angle is going to be impotant. I'll try a different setup tommorow, maybe looking down at the action.

I just did a few quick strokes in an attempt to show the difference in sound made by my 11/16 hollow-ground RJ Roberts Parabola and my 7/8 near-wedge J Wostenholme EBRO. Unfortunately I don't think my camera's mic picked that up very well. In the vid they sound pretty much the same.

One thing I noticed from this is that I appear to be pretty inconsistent in terms of tension on the strop. There's definitely a bit more slack in it at times - particularly with the Wostenholme. It's a heavier blade, but not *that* much heavier, and if anything I think I actually apply less downward pressure on it than the RJ Roberts as I rely mostly on the weight of the blade with very little added pressure. So to my mind, that leaves inconsistent strop tension as a likely explanation.

I also seem to be turning my wrist more than I expected. From my usual vantage point, it looks like the turn at the far end of the stroke is 90% fingers. But here I see that I'm turning my wrist more than I thought.

Interesting exercise you've come up with here!

Incidentally this is a Tony Miller Latigo strop - the one and only strop I have owned thus far. Love it!

2012 09 15 21 09 22 - YouTube