Thread: Too much Neatsfoot!!!!

Some good advice above. You might also try wrapping it in absorbent paper, covering with a cloth, and ironing under a moderate heat. The heat (the leather has to get hot, but nowhere hot enough to singe) draws the oil out - the paper wicks it away. Carry on, changing paper, until hardly any more oil is coming out. However, whatever you do there will still be oil at depth in the strop that will only migrate to the top over time. I left an oiled piece of leather wrapped in paper and under the pressure of a lot of old books for six months once - oil was still coming out after all that time...

Regards,
Neil

You can also use rubbing alcohol and a rag, and just treat it like your face as a teenager. Like all the other methods, you'll be pulling oil mostly from the surface and more will migrate up to replace it. Lather, rinse, repeat, I guess.

I think the cat litter idea is the best start; that stuff is champion at drawing up oil.

Do you have dogs? Mine think neatsfoot oil is some sort of treat. It does come from animals, from the long bone nearest the ground in cattle or something like that. It stays liquid at very cold temperatures, like those you get in winter close to the ground. Anyway, if I spilled it on furniture, I think my dogs would eat the furniture.

The only thing that would make me hesitate about putting something like cat litter directly onto the surface of a strop is its composition - there are a few types with different compounds in them, and the ones I have seen although granular do have a fine dust that isn't immediately apparent - what is that dust composed of. Early litters were made of some sort of clay material, others have a silica element, that comes from sand. These are abrasive materials. You might be exchanging one problem for another.

Neatsfoot oil does indeed come from the shinbones, roughkype, and also the feet of cattle (but not the hooves), 'neat' being an old word for cattle - sometimes in old english it was spelled 'neet'

Regards,
neil

Bentonite, which is metamorphosed volcanic ash. There's a lot of it where I live now. You don't want to drive beyond any if there's even the remotest chance of rain--once wet, it's slicker than catfish snot. It's also a great misfortune to discover that it underlies any part of your house, because your foundation will develop wanderlust.

You could separate it from the strop with paper towels, coffee filters, something like that to keep the dust off.

embarrasingly I've had a similar problem, unfortunately I can't even call it an accident, when I was starting out I watched a youtube tute and the guy on there soaked his strop in oil OVERNIGHT to "condition" it.

Like a mug (and not knowing any better) I went ahead and did the same, and as if that wasn't enough, gave the stropping area a couple of spritzes of shave oil for good measure.
So, what I ended up with was a heavy stretched out and disturbinly sticky strop, useless for everything bar corporal punishment. Hmmmm.
Solution? (bear in mind this was a cheap strop to begin with so please remain composed).
Several wipe downs of methylated spirits seemed to make little difference SOOOOO.....
I noticed this particular block of shower soap I'd been using made me itch like a flea ridden dog after every shower, so I got to thinking, it's probably heavy on lye and ripping the oil right out of my skin, I filled the kitchen sink with reasonably warm (a little on the hot side) water, loaded up a scrubbing brush with this horrid horrid soap and proceeded to scrub my greasy strop within inches of it's life.
Suffice to say it left a ring around the sink that looked a little like the Gulf of Mexico (after BP had been at it), repeated the process a few times and I could see that a lot of excess oil had been removed.
Lastly I took a trusty old bread knife and scraped it along the front and back surface of the strop and was rewarded with a thick, nasty, tarry scraping of goop for my trouble.
I then rinsed it completely clean under warm water, laid it flat in a warm spot (in my case on top of the heater) and waited.....
My main concern was that the leather was going to warp (it had already stretched terribly, mainly thanks to being overloaded with oil) or that it was going to dry stiff as a board.
As it happens, neither happened, there was still enough oil in the damn thing to keep it from drying out completely BUT it had rendered the strop at least partially usable once more.
I stress again, that this was a cheap and nasty strop to begin with (it's always nice to make blunders associated with learning on cheaper stuff), I'd probably be reduced to tears if I'd ruined a Dovo or a Cyril Salter strop, but for what it's worth, that's how I got on with my similar problem.
It's never going to be a GREAT strop, and I do plan to upgrade, but at least I've made (hopefully) all the most greivous blunders on a cheap bit of gear rather than the pricier, better quality equivalent.
For the record, I'm guessing regular old dishwashing detergent (the type that is designed to "cut through grease") would work equally well or better, just in case you don't have a block of cheap nasty soap hissing with sulphuric malice lying around

I put a drop of neatsfoot oil in 4 test tubes. I then poured Acetone, Denatured alcolhol, isopropyl alcohol and laquer thinner into the test tubes on top of the neatsfoot oil. Neither of the alcohols dissolved the neatsfoot oil at all. I shook the test tubes to see if the alcohols would work at all. It clouded and atomized into the alcohol, but after 10 minutes the neatsfoot oil collected in the bottom of the test tube. Acetone did ok, but laquer thinner was the best at dissolving the oil.

I first tried smashing it, rolling it, stepping on it while wrapped in a towel. I then tried using the bar glycerine saddle soap. The soap got a lot of oil out, but there is still a lot in there. My next test is going to be to dip it into the laquer thinner. I figure it's done already, so the laquer thinner can't hurt too much. My hope is that it will dry it out and I can start from scratch. On the top corner of the strop I placed a single drop of laquer thinner to see how it would react. It soaked in instantly. So I'm thinking a dip through laquer thinner may work well. We'll see.

Update:
So I tried the Laquer Thinner. It does not seem to distort the leather at all. Anywhere that there is not any oil it dries it out. I imagine it makes it just as brittle so be careful in handling if you try this. It also made the oil more mobile. I was able to wipe a lot more oil out of it after pouring laquer thinner over it.

Update 2:
After soaking it 2 times in laquer thinner, the laquer thinner alone made a huge difference, but even better was using a cloth to massage the strop while it was still wet with laquer thinner to wick the now thinner oil out of the strop. I've probably used 1/4 gallon of laquer thinner on it so far. The laquer thinner is quite nice because it dries out of the strop very fast.

Conclusion:
I believe the Laquer Thinner was the best option. I tried two methods.

1. was to just pour the laquer thinner over the strop. This caused excessive drying of the strop any place there was not excess oil as I mentioned above.

2. Was to pour the thinner in a pan and run the strop through it. I believe this worked the best because as it thinned the oil and diluted it, the solvent with some of the oil stayed in the rest of the strop. When the solvent evaporated out, it left a small amount of oil behind, which happened to be a good amount in the rest of the strop. Analogous to this I think would have been to just add some oil to the laquer thinner, then dip the strop into it. The advantage of this would be that I wouldn't have to wait 24 hours for the oil to soak in and diffuse.

Cons would be that laquer thinner is harsh, and if your strop has any gold lettering on it or other fancy stuff, it's going to come off. So I definitely would not recommend this for a strop that you care about loosing the writing or some of the dye. Both came off of mine.

My strop does however work awesome. No issues with it whatsoever.

Extra Info:
My strop arrived too stiff to strop with. After wiping small amounts of oil on it 10 times or so over a month, the strop was still too inflexible to allow the razor to touch the entire surface. I got impatient and poured a strip down the middle of the strop. I intended to wipe it off, but was distracted by something and when I came back all of it was soaked in. Now it's such a grease ball that when trying to apply chromium paste, the neatsfoot just dissolves the paste and it comes off in a semi liquid when I strop.

I hope it was a cheap strop . Since leather is porous , it will suck up oil like a sponge . Good luck with whatever you try , but I'm inclined to believe it's a lost cause .

so after I was done, my strop came out pretty well but pretty shortly thereafter the oil that was welled up in the middle of the leather wicked out and it was still too slick to provide the strop with any "teeth".
I tried my process again this time using sugar soap and it worked really well, really stripped the oil out.
The strop is stretched out, but still maleable and probably a little on the dry side.
I'll leave it for a couple of days to see if the oil from the centre soaks its way out onto the surface again, if it does, I should have a splendid finished product, if not I'll look at using the minimum possible oil, probably shaving oil sprayed on the palms of my hands and lightly smeared over the surface.
Amazingly durable stuff leather (fortunately).

I was reading a 1937 POPULAR MECHANICS magazine I acquired the other day and it had a remedy for oily belts.

It said use sawdust first, followed by powdered chalk to remove excess oil from leather.

Originally Posted by Wullie

I was reading a 1937 POPULAR MECHANICS magazine I acquired the other day...

You know, I'm more curious to know how you came to be reading a 1937 issue of popular mechanics in the first place.
and here I thought the magazines in MY doctor's waiting room were out of date.