Thread: How often to clean yah strop ?

Do you guys clean it with saddle soap every 10,000 miles ?

Here is the footage. Look at the airborne dust at 1.25 in the video, just prior to the test.

Dust is everywhere.

(SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Micro-droplets - NHK World report)

Hey Marty
Damp towel before stropping

I remember my barber flicking water on his strop. I asked here years ago why he did that but got no answers.

What does the water do to the draw?

Never. Leather strop is wiped with the ball of my thumb before stropping. To me that is oiling rather than cleaning.

The only cleaning I do is with a damp cloth maybe once a year. Depending on the strop I may give it a tad of neatsfoot every now and then.

Personally I hate saddlesoap. It was formulated for saddles and really thick tough leather not strops or fine leather. Water and leather in general don't mix.

My opinion of course.

A lightly damp microfiber will make the dust cling to the micro fiver towel so you are not just spreading it around.

It will increase the draw slightly, but there is so little water on the strop it evaporates quickly. I also wipe the linen.

I’m with spendur here. I used to palm rub, and when I’d clean the cloth was a dirty gray. I stopped palm rubbing and when I clean, the cloth is clean. Skin oil has salt in it and that doesn’t sound good for leather or steel. Below is my 8-year old Kanoyama 80000. It’s never had anything put on it, and for the past 3-4 years, not rubbed except one pass lightly before use to remove dust. It’s polished like a mirror and as soft as the day that I got it. Iwasaki said that over oiling a strop destroyed it’s polishing power. From his book chapter for barbers:

‘Some also spread oil on the strop to soften it, but it’s very common to over-apply oil. In such a case, no matter how you polish the leather it will never become glossy, and it will lose half its edge-polishing power.’

Just use it. The only thing that our strops need to be protected from is us.