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Blue Jean strop?

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JTR357

JTR357

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I have a habit of stropping my blade on the pant leg of my blue jeans.Does this do anything?Is blue jean material sufficient to polish the blade's edge?
I mostly do it as an afterthought to keep my hands busy,but I'm wondering if I'm actually doing anything useful at all.:o

Thanks in advance for your input.:thumbup:
 
it does help to knock any small burrs off an edge. i know a guy that does the same thing to kill time and he said he notices his knife getting sharper.
 
I find myself doing the same thing, too. And then I realized I was just making a few final stropping "passes" on my jeans to wipe off the stropping compound from the blade! :) In any case, it can't hurt. There are even some experienced sharpeners who recommend a final pass or two on blue jeans (or bare leather).
 
I always use my jeans to strop my small blades, but I dont think it does much on larger (thicker) blades. It does work wonders on razors though. One your disposable blade on a Fusion or Mach 3 gets towards the dull side, run it down jeans a few times (opposite direction you use when shaving; away from the edge), and it will glide like new. I can use a single blade for a month or so using this, saves tons of money considering their cost.
 
The more refined the edge is (fully apexed, in other words), the more you can/will notice the effect of stropping on otherwise less-aggressive materials like denim & paper. The size of the blade shouldn't matter, so long as the edge itself is highly refined. Some here have even mentioned seeing a difference after stropping on the palms of their hands. For the most part, it just removes the fine burrs as mentioned. As for polishing, I think CLEAN denim won't do much. But, based on my own habits of wiping compounds off blades on my jeans (also as mentioned), some 'dirty' denim could do at least a little polishing, I'd bet. I have no doubt, at least a few pairs of my own jeans have been more-or-less permanently impregnated with a mix of silicon carbide dust (wet/dry paper), Simichrome polish and 1 micron diamond paste. I've got black marks on the jeans I'm wearing right now, from some wet/dry sandpaper sharpening I did yesterday. ;)
 
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