Thread: A few strop questions.

Regarding good to higher end strops does the type of fabric matter that's attached to the leather strop? Looking on SRD there is a whole bunch of options and looking around here I haven't found where one type of fabric is prefered over the other.

Paste: If I understand right different paste are used to liven up the edge instead of going back to the hone? And one wouldn't want to strop everyday with a pasted strop, correct?

This straight razor stuff is like an itch you can't scratch. I blame y'all and B&B for this. Good thing I've been working a bit of overtime lately cause I'm about to jump in with both feet.

Thanks guys,
Matt

If you look enough you'll find someone who prefers each one over the other. It really is a preference thing. I like the webbed fabric for my clean linen, but some don't because if you have the spine of the razor straight across it when stropping it gives a very noticeable zipping sound. I find that by angling the spine by 15 to 20 degrees you eliminate most of that. I also use crox on a separate webbed fabric, but I also have the pressed wool with crox. Once again it's a preference of which you will like, they both do the job. I looked at the different choices on SRD after reading your post and hadn't realized they had the premium fabric which I had wanted to try, so I ordered two of them. And, you are correct, you do not want to use a pasted strop daily. Use it as little as possible, but experiment with it and you'll find the sweet spot, which will change as you progress with your technique, both shaving and stropping, and I'm sure, eventually honing. Good luck!!!

Regards,

Howard

It really is primarily a personal choice if you're talking about using the fabric without pastes. My preference on the SRD strops is the premium fabric, which is the traditional heavy cotton. However, I can't say it works any better than the nylon webbing.

If you're talking about pastes, most feel that the cotton or wool felt are better than the nylon webbing.

You can use the pasted fabric to touchup or refresh a blade without taking it to the hones. With experience you'll get a sense of how often you need to do this, but you definitely do not need to do this for every shave.

One of the keys here is to make sure your stropping technique is correct and you do enough laps on the fabric and leather. Good stropping will increase the number of shaves before you have to go to pastes or the hones.