It did! Its a zombie now. I think you need a gun with silver bullets to stop this thing.
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It did! Its a zombie now. I think you need a gun with silver bullets to stop this thing.
:roflmao :rofl2::roflmaoQuote:
Originally Posted by AFDavis11
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. :D
X
It has a lifeline reference in the wiki :rock:Quote:
Originally Posted by honedright
Stroping is King - long live the King
Long live this thread!
As to the original topic of this thread, I've come around to believing that Scott is quite right about the importance of stropping.Quote:
Originally Posted by mparker762
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.
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).Quote:
Originally Posted by matt321
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.
...maybe the longest; but overall one of the very best threads I have ever read here. I learned a bunch.
Scott, immense thanks
Quote:
Originally Posted by kevint
Yes this is a very good thread that I think everyone should read.
I just finished all the 26 pages and I didn't really think that stropping was as important as it now seems.
Btw just for the record I'm on my 22nd shave now and the edge seems to dull a little bit for every day now but I blame that on my sub-par stropping skills since its my first 22 shaves. It seems as new edges form SRD are magical! Or maybe I just have low standards.
Btw did you ever come as far as making the test a reality or did it never happen?
Long live this thread!
Anyone with a silver bullet? :gwh:
I will second that, I love this thread
Has some GREAT information that I think many guys would benefit from
I find my chest hair is ideal for this test... perfect length, and always at hand and easy to pluck.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kees
Also, I wonder what a barber would think of someone who comes in asking for hair.
This is nothing to be ashamed of. I'm still in this bracket myself.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrLastway
Did you mean this? http://straightrazorpalace.com/strop...phase-2-a.htmlQuote:
Originally Posted by MrLastway
me too.........Quote:
Originally Posted by xman
Thank you all for a very good thread.
Seemed on it's way to flame-war status a couple of times but the main "antagonists" sorted that out in a gentlemanly way. :)
I just have to comment on the view of "science" that seems to be common.
An example:
"Just like I know there must be gravity if I'm not floating around"
Statements like this are rampant throughout this thread and most of them are as wrong as this one.
If youre not floating around youre experiencing acceleration. Accelleration and gravity is not the "same thing", and what is it "really"?
Similar statements about it being an "objective fact" that "sharpening involves removal of material" etc are all referencing a very newtonian, macro, view-of-the-world that we "objectively know" is not at all relevant at small scales.
Just a thought.
Carry on...
/h
Say...what?Quote:
Originally Posted by hakan
Re-reading this thread was fun. I was taken aback by Ureelbirds comment in the beginning that suggested that stropping should/could remove an entire bevel and leave nothing but the new edge.
I need to work on that idea.
From the experience I have gained in the last two years I would say that Scott's comment about using linen in the stropping has the greatest effect on persuading me that that was (and still is) the cause of his extended honing intervals.
I can now sharpen a blade at any time using linen alone. I think the complexities and frustrations of this thread are firmly routed in the fact that we were all focused on the wrong part of the strop.
I agree with everyone else this is one of the best threads I have read through with some really good information in it. I have a lot of things I want to try from this thread to improve my stropping.
On a side note did anyone else find it slightly amusing that the person advocating stropping as king is a guy with a handle of honedright and I thank him for passing along his knowledge.
Wow...
The little blurb on the wiki did not do justice to this thread...but there were several dicey moments where it looked like the conversation was degrading to ruin.
I would LOVE to be able to go 6mos without honing (or using pasted strops) and set this as my goal.
Thanks to all of the guys who put in to this thread and stuck with it to share their experiences. Maybe I'll post back in 9mos to share if I made it or not. (I say 9mos to give me 3 to figure out technique).
A good read for any new straight shavers.
where's the original video? first link doesn't work!
File:Stropping.AVI - Straight Razor Place Wiki
This is that video I went looking for it awhile ago. I think its on youtube also.
Thank U! It was not easy to find this time!
Quote:
Originally Posted by honedright
kind of like golf...with the str8 shaving, the end all is the shave quality...how we all get there is part fact, part technique and part intuition...with golf, the final factor is the ball flight and score...but with both str8 shaving and golf, the satisfaction is in some large part the journey itself...now, let it be known that I'm a noob to str8 shaving (less than a year) and I play golf like a noob (not much of a chance in the sandbox) but...every so often I get the BBS (usaully with my Dovo or WB thick blade) all around with no missed spots and every so often I'll tag a 275 yard 5-wood...when the earth and heavens align themselves and the result is near perfection...just enjoy it like a good cask strength single malt Scotch...