Thread: Cleaning a strop: How I do it

I bought this paddle less than a year ago when I bought my first straight razor.
On one side it is a fine leather strop, on the other side it is green-pasted. I made the mistake when using the green-pasted side not to clean the razor before passing to the leather side. The result was that the green paste residuals passed from the razor onto the leather. Moreover, from the daily use, metal and dirt were joined on the leather.
In a certain point some months ago, I had the “marvelous” idea to pass the yellow dovo paste (the leather strop conditioner) on the edge of the leather to “make it better”. The result was a leather surface full of dirt, without the initial smoothness, and of course with worse stropping ability compared to the one that had in the beginning (in my opinion of course).

Under these circumstances I wanted to clean up this paddle and to bring it back as near as possible to its original condition.

I thought the best way to clean it was to use a dry cleaning processes similar to the one they use in the laundry services.
So, I bought the perchloroethylene* (tetrachloroethylene*), took some soft cloth, and started to rub the cloth impregnated with the solvent onto the leather. I continued rubbing and cleaning for about 5 minutes. Then I left the paddle to dry.
After less than an hour the leather of the paddle was dry and very clean, quite as it was when I bought it.

* perchloroethylene or tetrachloroethylene is the solvent that is being used for dry cleaning and I bought it from a chemical shop.

BEFORE CLEANING:






AFTER CLEANING:



AFTER DRYING:





PS: sorry for the bad quality and brightness of the photos. I can't do any better.