I found this great strop today

Macchina

Macchina

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I don't know if anyone else has posted this yet, but I found that my pantleg makes an excellent strop. I hold the pants taunt by pulling at the knee, and take a few passes as you would with any other strop. It's nice, because you can strop at work, you can strop in the car (not recommended), you can strop while on the toilet (again, not recommended), you can even strop in a shop :rolleyes: . I was going to patent it, but found out Abercrombie already did (the demolished fit:barf: )
 
Is there really an increase in sharpness at all..? Are you sure it is not all in your head?
 
There is a significant increase in sharpness. I went from a spyderco fine (white) benchstone to my right pantleg, the sharpness went from sharp to scary sticky sharp on all of my knives that I tried it on (1095, 440C, and S30V).
 
I tried it on one of my nice pairs of jeans, and I noticed an increase in sharpness as well. Good find. I'm thinking it has something to do with the texture of the jeans, instead of smooth or rough leather.
 
Django606 said:
I tried it on one of my nice pairs of jeans, and I noticed an increase in sharpness as well. Good find. I'm thinking it has something to do with the texture of the jeans, instead of smooth or rough leather.
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I'm sure you're right.

I've tried many things including my jeans on my leg but...
Are you planning on wearing these still? If not, you could load 'em up with some polishing compound.

.
 
That's a good idea to try on one of my older pairs of jeans. I wonder how solid stick compound would stick to them?
 
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if a pair of jeans can act like a strop, the metal is too soft.
 
no the metal is not too soft. jeans will make any steel sharper by stroping on it. ive even heard stropping in the palm of your hand works. not something i would do but i read it in a knife magazine once.
 
I don't know if it's true, but i've heard that Gap makes stonewashed jeans by stropping twenty Busse knives on the legs. And Busse knives are sharp, so that is solid scientific evidence that this works!
 
flatgrinder said:
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if a pair of jeans can act like a strop, the metal is too soft.
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And yet, Ernest Emerson reccomends stropping on the back of a legal pad? I see.

I stropped my S30V Sebenza, which is NOT soft, and noticed an increase of sharpness. If that's considered soft I would like to know what hard steels you use to make knives :p
 
orthogonal1 said:
Doesn't this phenomena have somethin' to do with micro burrs?
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More than likely. Why does stropping on the palm of the hand work better than the back of the arm, which is a far more regular surface? I'm guessing that it has to do with the texture of the skin. My hands have ridges. My arms don't. This also explains denim, leather, and canvas quite nicely.

While my personality is arguably abrasive, my hands probably aren't...not enough to polish steel, anyway. What's probably happening is that I'm pulling and resetting the teeth on the edge so that they're oriented back in the proper direction.
 
Razor strops sometimes have one leather side and one canvas side. Denim isn't that much different from canvas. I don't see why denim couldn't strop something just as well.
 
Michaelmcgo,

Maybe you could do a bit of testing to see if you're seeing an actual increase in sharpness? For example, newspaper cutting that is posted elsewhere in this forum. It would give a more objective evaluation of what you're seeing.

May not totally answer why you're getting a difference, but it would at least show that you are getting a result.

Or maybe look at the edge under magnification before and after, to see if you see a difference.

I think at least one study has shown that stropping on a material with no abrasive doesn't really improve the edge, but if there was something else going on, for example a thin burr that might come off or straighten with this method, then it could show a difference in sharpness.

cbw
 
Dave Rishar said:
What's probably happening is that I'm pulling and resetting the teeth on the edge so that they're oriented back in the proper direction.
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Not as much the teeth as the actual edge itself. If you look under magnification down into a used edge it will be massively deformed (on the scale of the edge). The edge, while being made of high strength steel, is really thin (microns) which means it is basically a million times easier to bend to a set than a piece of bar stock.

Take a metal shaving from a lathe and press it against your skin and it will bend even though your skin is way softer than the metal, same thing happens at the edge. If you do it right after loaded stropping you can often see a small increase in sharpness as well, 10% or so (thread), which is due to removal of debris and mainly the sign that the polishing compound wasn't properly loaded. Many people apply it really thick and it clumps to the edge.

Reeve's Sebenza in S30V by the way is actually fairly soft for a knife steel, there are steels which are again harder than that blade as that knife is harder than really cheap kitchen knives.

-Cliff
 
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