Thread: Making a paddle strop- Tutorial

I have been planing to make a new paddle strop for a while now, and today I finally decided to do it. In the process I thought I'd take a few pics and post here for others to try if they want.
This is not my first paddle strop. I made a similar one before, for it I used Latigo and felt to make it double sided paddle.
For both strops I used Iwasaki's method of treating the leather to make it as smooth as possible.
I wanted to make the new strop with horse hide, recently I got a nice big piece of 7oz horsehide from e-bay. I used one of the pieces from it for the paddle today.

First I got a 3" wide piece of oak from Home depot and cut it to 3 feet length. Please be sure when you buy wood for paddle , that it is flat, wood with bow will not be very useful IMO.

I cut a handle in the paddle and sanded lightly the surface that will meet the leather with a medium sandpaper sponge. After that I applied contact cement to both the leather(on the rough side) and the paddle:




The leather was wider and longer than the paddle , so I trimmed it to match.





The leather is untreated so it is not even, to correct this I use sandpaper progression.
First I scuffed the strop with 400 sandpaper to show how many low spots it has:



To speed up the work on flattening the leather I use 150 grit sandpaper first. I use a wood block to wrap the sand paper around to make sure it is flat when sanding the surface of the strop.