Thread: My New Strops.

Ill be looking to add a fabric component as soon as I can find a decent source of linen webbing! I have some felt I was thinking of using but I've heard its so/so for dia-spray


and thanks Mike! those ones are my favourite too, reminds me of the classic red Latigo leather


and to the mods thanks for the prompt and kind guidance!

Hemp webbing is also an option for a second component. I have a couple of strops with a very nice herring bone weaved hemp second. Leather work is one of those things that I have done very little of. There is some nice leather work being shown in the thread "we have skills too"

oh good call! ill look into hemp as well.

is that so! Ill check it out for sure

Do you or anyone you know, make shell cordovan strops at home for people like us, who can't afford a $400. shell strop? Let us know. Thanks.

Shell is very hard to come by for a reasonable price. The domestic option is Horween shell, and the shells themselves are not oriented to get much strop material out of them. Two max out of a large shell that's selected to be long and narrow rather than more traditional shape. I would imagine that just the leather itself will be hard to get below $100 after you sell off the outside parts of the shell and make two strops, and then on top of that, it's really not very durable and not that good for strops that are going to be used with anything but the most gentle polished rounded spine razors.

No clue on the international shell, but you'd have to do a lot of work.

If you want very good but not too expensive, you need strops that are made out of horse butt strips and then broken in.

I saw a picture of the cuts of leather on a horse and the rump strips are the shell strips. Thanks for the advice.

The shell is under the skin instead of on the surface. my understanding is that it's the membrane that the horse uses to twitch their rear when they're trying to get flies off.

I could be wrong, though.

I looked up the shells from the italian maker of shell cordovan and they are 165 euros, so if they are ultimately any cheaper than getting horween shells (you used to be able to get horween shells through their "tannery row" retail front end, maybe you can't anymore, I don't know).

Maybe some of the other tanneries are cheaper, but the italian tannery leather also does not resemble the shell that's on old strops. The japanese strops are also different, less of a glaze on the leather and more of what looks like burnishing. Less hard/stiff strops, too, than the horween type.

Biggest waste of money I've ever made in anything strop related was buying a no. 2 shell from horween and making a strop out of it, and then learning that it can't handle any spinework on a razor - not even something relatively plain like a dovo bismark. Net cost after selling off the outside parts of the shell was still about $140 to make a strop, and it's still in my closet almost unused.