Thread: Stropping is King

It did! Its a zombie now. I think you need a gun with silver bullets to stop this thing.

Originally Posted by AFDavis11

It did! Its a zombie now. I think you need a gun with silver bullets to stop this thing.

Scott

It did back in 2006

There was a stropping discussion a little while ago that I wanted to link here. Now I know where it is.

X

Originally Posted by honedright

Holy crap!! I thought this thread died a long time ago.....


Scott

It has a lifeline reference in the wiki

Stroping is King - long live the King

Long live this thread!

Originally Posted by mparker762

I'm doing some experimenting myself and getting some very encouraging results but I'm in the early stages yet. Unfortunately it's making my morning shaves pretty boring.

As to the original topic of this thread, I've come around to believing that Scott is quite right about the importance of stropping.

My comment above was a reference to my attempts to duplicate Scott's year-long blade life. This meant sing the same razor every single day using only the strop to keep it going, and keeping daily notes as to how things were going. As my comment indicates it was pretty boring going, and unfortunately the most I was able to manage was just over three months before I succumbed to boredom and switched razors. The first test run was with a TI and ended in failure, the second was with a Heljestrand and ended in boredome, and the third was with a Friodur and also ended in boredom.

The TI was a definite outlier - it had a slight bend to the blade that didn't cause any problems in the early going because the strop (NOS Craftsman) had an uneven enough surface that it could reach up into the concave side of the razor and keep the edge polished - until the daily stropping finally flattened it out smooth.

The other two razors behaved similarly to each other over the course of their test runs. They settled down in a few days to the sharpness they would have for the next roughly three months. Whenever I had a less-than-great shave I'd strop it again after the shave for 100 laps or so, being extra careful to keep the pressure light and the strop tight. I suspect that many of these subpar edges were caused by careless stropping rather than the edge actually wearing out, since many of them were a case of great shave one day followed by "meh" shave the next. But both the Heljestrand and Friodur ended the test roughly as sharp as they began it (within the range of daily variability), and I'm confident that they would have kept going for many more months.

I'm also quite certain that the linen is slightly abrasive. I did another experiment during this period where I took a proven Wostenholm and sliced through heavy paper about 10 times until the edge was sufficiently gone that it had trouble scraping armhair off. It took about 45 minutes of solid stropping until the edge came back to where it was before. Some of this was on a current-production Illinois, and the final few hundred laps were on my trusty Craftsman. I suspect that the Craftsman was much more effective than the Illinois, but haven't really pursued this.

My linen strops definitely get dirty with use, even though I clean the oil off my blades before stropping, which I think is further evidence that they're removing material from the blade. When I was doing that monster stropping session on the Wostenholm I started with a brand new Illinois and the color change was really evident over the course of the session.

At the moment I'm playing around with a Tony Miller paddle with horsehide on one side, and his linen on the other. I've only been using it a week, but it seems to be working fine. What I'm curious about is if it will reduce the occurrence of those mysterious sudden mediocre shaves, which I suspect were caused by carelessness with the hanger.

Changing this around to the issue of the initial hone session rather than extending the time between home sessions; do your results imply that a good linen strop is more important than honing beyond 8k? If so, then stropping is King indeed. I've got 10k and 16k hones, but I'm starting to wonder if these super-grit rocks really matter.

Originally Posted by matt321

Changing this around to the issue of the initial hone session rather than extending the time between home sessions; do your results imply that a good linen strop is more important than honing beyond 8k? If so, then stropping is King indeed. I've got 10k and 16k hones, but I'm starting to wonder if these super-grit rocks really matter.

This is kind of a surprising question for me - I wasn't aware that there's every been a consensus that you *need* a hone beyond 8k. My Shaptons, Nakayama, and Spyderco are nice to have, but I've never thought of them as necessary. The 4k/8k Norton was the bees knees back when I started, and did the job just fine. It was quite common back then to strop a razor on the linen for 90-100 laps after honing in order to smooth out the edge. Some members shaved straight off the 8k, and common experience was that the edge improved the first few shaves before settling down. So this isn't something new, it's just fallen out of fashion a bit now that high-grit stones are readily available and inexpensive (the Shapton 30k used to be $600, and if you wanted a coticule you had to be prepared to win the bidding war on ebay, though eschers were cheap because nobody knew what they were).

The linen strop is just another way of polishing the bevel. The linen side of the strop is a high-grit hone all by itself, even when unpasted. It's not as fun as playing with $$$ hones, but it does work well if you've got a good strop and know how to use it.