Thread: Ranking of strop materials

Here's the strop I've been using, it's just a hacked up piece of horse butt with hardware stolen off of one of those $12 ebay strops (I didn't know any better several years ago with the ebay strop, at least I could use the hardware for something).

Just wanted to make it clear that I don't think any of this high dollar spending is necessary. I think there's about $7 or $8 worth of horse butt in that strop, and the edges are ugly because it was 3 inches wide at some point and out of laziness, I decided to cut the outside edges off without doing a good job of it.

It maintains a razor better than any of the purchased cowhide strops I had, but it was pretty harsh and coarse until it wore in (took about a month of daily use)



And here is the silk finish type linen i'm talking about. This one is on the back of an illinois #226 horsehide strop (it was NOS, i'm not aware of them making horse leather strops now). I would love to have any NOS branded version of this, the waxy whitish linen that has "silk finish" anywhere in the name.