Made my first knife strop. What compound to use?

C

ctucker90

Joined
Dec 29, 2014
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I spent the weekend making my first knife strop. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I have a couple questions though. What compound would you recommend if you could only have 2? (I only have two sides to the strop). From the research I've done I'm leaning towards diamond spray 1 micron and .5 micron from Hand American. I also made a matching travel size strop to carry with me to work and such. Do I need to use the same compound on both strops for consistency or can I use the diamond spray on one and chromium oxide for example on the travel one?

The strop is 10 X 3 X 3/4 inches and I used were 8 ounce vegetable tanned steer hide and walnut wood. I added a brass tube for a leather lanyard tube. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks for the help!

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Nice work, real clean lines in what you did.

I have one that a friend made for me. It has one smooth side and the other with the rough side of the leather out. I have been using it for close to 15 years and when I first got it I loaded it with red jewelers rouge I had on hand, not sure that is recommended, but I was a young buck then, and used what I had.

Not sure I am using it to its fullest but it knocks off the wire edge and puts some polish on the blade. I use it to hone/polish "traditional" ground edges as well as convex with success.
 
I use the green stick compound. I'm fairly certain I got it at Lowes. I heat the leather and the compound with my wife's hair dryer.

When mine turns gnarly black from all the metal, take some 99 cent automotive hand cleaner and clean it up. Let it dry over night and then reapply some more compound. Good as new.

BTW, beautiful strop! You'll cringe the first time you slightly miss a stroke and slice into it. Don't worry about it. They kind of heal themselves.

I go on the cheap side and glue a few 5 gallon paint sticks together for my strop. Cut a tad off their length and BAM.
 
I use the black compound from a cheap multi pack I picked up a few years ago, more aggressive than the green but its worked well enough so far.

Nice work on the strop!
 
If you own steels with vanadium carbides, go with diamond or CBN compounds

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My recommendation would be to try a coarse particulate abrasive of ~10-16 micron diamond or CBN. Because stropping compounds are applied to a compressible material, the abrasive particles both tend to embed themselves into the stropping material, an the strop itself gives under the edge as you make edge trailing passes. These effects combine to leave a massively finer apex finish than the grit rating of the compound itself.

In my own experimentation with coarse particulate abrasives for stropping, I've found that a 16 micron CBN emulsion on suede leaves an apex finish approximating a 6k-8k waterstone, and a 30 micron CBN emulsion on suede leaves an apex finish approximating a 3k-5k apex finish. Diamond pastes commonly available tend to be less finely graded and to embed less in the media, so I would want a 10-12 micron diamond paste to replicate the 16 micron CBN emulsion.

The biggest advantage of coarse particulate abrasives is that they are chosen to match the desired apex finish, so there is no risk of "over stropping" or "killing the edge" or ending up with an "overly buffed" edge, since you are not using a stropping compound that is much finer than the apex finish you want to end up with. Coarse particulate abrasive strops can even be used for touch-ups between sharpenings as there is little to no risk of "killing the edge" based on number of passes.
 
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