Thread: pasting question from a honing stone guy

Hello all... I've got a paste issue/problem/question and would like a bit of insight.

Though I'm a dedicated razor honer that finishes on a bare leather strop, I'm asking about strops for camping knives. Strops conform to the profile of convex knives much easier than a flat hone, so outdoor knife users tend to carry pasted strops to touch up their edges, and often sharpen their knives on a series of wet/dry papers on mousepads up to 1500 and then finish on a bench strop with a wax-based blue paste called Starkie Blue, which, as I understand it, has a 2 micron size. This system works very well

My simple project is to convert a Thiers travel strop to one that I toss in my backpack, and I'd like to select a second paste to complementary this 2-micron StarkieBlue. The second paste should be courser, so that if a friend asks me to sharpen (or touchup) their knife, I can marginally fix their edge, and then polish/finish it with the Blue. I already have (from an old razor paste strop experiment) a small tube of tube of Dovo red. It's the cream, not the hard paste. But I can't seem to find much information on it except that it's "mild" or is "2-4 microns". I'm looking for something to treat my strop with that approximates a 1500 wet-dry sandpaper. Does such an animal exist?

Ive got a pasted strop with 5, 10 and 15 micron, ebay has a good range of diamond pastes but i cant remember the conversion from grit to micron .

I can touch up my convex blade kitchen knives resonably well on them. I crox on the little utility knife so the wife can cut tomatoes works a treat.

You could always glue some sandpaper to some leather, there is a glue you can get for sticking sanding discs to the flat platten of a disc sander. Its like a light style of contact adhesive.

Got me thinking now, a larger range of pasted paddles for all my knives depending on the job at hand. Might be the next project i got a whole heap of rimu tongue and groove downstairs and the leathersmith down the road likes cashies for smaller offcuts.