Thread: Leather Quality for use in srtop(ping)

Draw is the amount of friction between the razor and the strop. Some are light (very little friction) while others impart heavier draw. Like the various grinds, you won't know which end of the spectrum you prefer until you've done your own testing.

Originally Posted by Speedster

Draw is the amount of friction between the razor and the strop. Some are light (very little friction) while others impart heavier draw. Like the various grinds, you won't know which end of the spectrum you prefer until you've done your own testing.

Thanks!

It is hard to find leather and hardware to make your own strop
for less than than the cost of a lot of good strops.

I made a bunch of test strops with leather from Tandy.
Oiled, dry, pasted and more.
I learned a lot.

Of interest I pulled a three year ago test strop down and
gave it visit. lt was heavy leather almost 3" wide.
see "Heavyweight Natural Cowhide Leather Strips" on the Tandy site.

I had added CrOx to the cut side and used way too much Neatsfoot oil.
Over the three years it had improved. Who knew?

It took a harsh Shapton Glass too sharp and harsh edge and made the razor
shave nicely.

Try stuff... but start with a nice medium price strop. They are all good.

Originally Posted by kelbro

I have a lot of stuff from SaddleBack Leather and they tout 'full grain' cowhide as being the best leather. Not sure how it would work for strops but it's really nice hide.

It would be substandard compared to a broken in piece of vegetable tanned horse butt from a butt strip. Cowhide is nice leather, but if it was the best strop, they would've used it in the early 1900s when there was a full selection of leathers widely available for reasonable prices in all geographies. They chose butt strip and horse shell.

The only trick with butt strip is either ordering a few so that you're sure you'll have a smooth run of leather about two feet long, or being able to select one that has no wrinkle at all.

Butt strip cuts very easily with a sharp marking knife and a steel straight edge. Very easily.

I have a cautionary tale about oiling. leather will take a LOT of oil.

When my dad was younger, he would fix peoples' baseball gloves for a few bucks. Back when people actually kept things, it wasn't uncommon for someone to ask to have a glove restrung with rawhide and then oiled. One of the people he restrung a glove for didn't want to have the glove oiled and didn't have the patience to do it himself.

He put it in a drip pan of used oil overnight, and it became significantly heavier than expected, and looked strange my dad saw him at the next game. He asked my dad if he knew how to get oil out of the glove. Dad said that the guy had panicked after he found out the glove increased substantially in weight, that it was too heavy to be comfortably used, and it was beat up because the guy drove over it back and forth with his car thinking he could squeeze the oil back out of it!

If you ever rubbed a glove, you use either a small rag or your fingers and just rub in a little at a time until the surface of the glove gets its life back. It takes a while.

Lesson being, or attempt at it, the leather will take on a lot more oil than you want it to take on.

Oily rag is also a method to apply oil to a surface - not soaking rag, but lightly oiled (may have been suggested already).