Strop abrasives I have tried
I am a beginner so my opinions have very little experience behind them. I'm not posting this as advice. I'm posting it to ask questions based on how I feel the strops perform based on my limited experience. I also base my opinions on how the hanging hair test does. I know this is not as good as a shave test but I use it when I have already shaved. The problem I have with only using the shave test is I want my shaves to get better as fast as possible. If I can only test my razors by shaving that means one (maybe two) tests per day. This is just too slow. So, I use the HHT. While not a fool-proof test at least it’s something. I may just be too impatient.
To determine performance of sharpening tools when sharpening things I believe you need to dull the edge first. I get my razor to NOT cut a hanging hair by doing about 4-5 passes on a 16k shapton glass stone. My honing (stones) skill isn’t that great either so I take that into consideration. Then I strop with the poly-webbing then leather testing the edge using the HHT after each step.
I have a poly-webbing strop that I sprayed with .5 micron CBN spray when I got it. I liked how it worked. Then I got some .5 micron chromium oxide from SRD and put it on the webbing strop on top of the spray. The amount of abrasion seemed to go down at least 50%. I had to do at least twice the number of strokes to get the same sharpness (approx.) as the CBN. Then I applied .25 micron diamond spray on the other side and it is more aggressive than the ch ox. On the poly-webbing strop I can’t tell any difference in the .25 or .5 micron sprays but the chromium oxide .5 micron crayon is much less aggressive. Don’tget me wrong. It works well, just not as fast as the sprays I’ve tried. The razor needs many more passes to get the edge as sharp. I’ve seen this kind ofdifference in abrasives sharpening knives when I use CBN sprays compared to cheaper diamond sprays or pastes. They have a less concentration of diamond in the spray. I believe that’s the issue there. Different type abrasives make a huge difference also. CBN is supposed to cut faster than diamond. That sort of thing.
It seems at the moment that the crayon .5 micron chromium oxide is less abrasive as the CBN or diamond spray I’ve used on poly-webbing. I still take into consideration my inexperience in stropping when I form an opinion.
The reason I’m going through all this stuff is when learning to sharpen knives I bought stones of different types, different strops of different leather types (and balsa) as well as different type abrasives. This went on for about 5 years. While interesting and enjoyable, I don’t want to go through that with razors. I bought the richman’s strop on whippeddog.com and I will probably get one of the strops on SRD but I hope THAT’S IT. I’d appreciate as much info as I can get so I don’t need to try as many different things as I did with knives. I have a linen replacement strop from SRD coming in the mail today to compare with the poly-webbing. I have 2-3 sprays I can try as well as the crayon. I will probably put the cr ox on one side of the linen. Then I’ll apply .1 micron CBN on the other and compare. If the .1 micron isn’t abrasive enough I’ll try .25 or .5 micron spray. Not a lot of noticable difference there though. Not without fancy cutting and testing equipment. All I care about is how the razor does on my face. And the HHT when I don’t have any whiskers between shaves.
I may be in too much of a hurry. I may be wasting my time. Right now I’m new to straightrazors. It wasn’t until I had 3+ years of knife sharpening (several hours per day many times) under my belt that I was able to really tell much difference in the results of the stones and strops and strop compounds. But (I think this is important), I would not have learned knife sharpening nearly as fast if I only sharpened knives when they got dull under normal use. I’d sharpen one till it would whittle a hair then try to cut my sharpening stone in half to dull the edge then sharpen it again. I believe learning to strop a razor requires more than 50-100 passes between each shave just to keep it shave ready. I don’t work anymore and have the time to spend just stropping. I’m going to learn this crap! You guys talk about BBS shaves. I want to do more than read about them. :)