Polished vs. Coarse edges

If you lift it too much, the leather can indent too heavily around the edge and possible abrade across it which would reduce sharpness.

I always go as flat as possible, some blades need more force than others as well. It depends on the composition and hardness.

You can mark the edge a little to see where you are hitting it, same as you would with a stone. Try a few different pressures to find the optimal one.

-Cliff
 
Originally posted by Cliff Stamp
If you lift it too much, the leather can indent too heavily around the edge and possible abrade across it which would reduce sharpness.
<snip>You can mark the edge a little to see where you are hitting it, same as you would with a stone.
Click to expand...

Thank you very much for being so helpful Cliff.

Yes, I kind of knew about too much lift raking or abrading the edge - however it is too easy a thing to do when doing free-hand stropping on a hanging strip type leather strop - I don't think I do it consistently enough to be sure this has been my fault/problem - but I'm sure there are times when lifting the blade off the strop to turn it over I may well have raked the edge.

I am (obviously) now paying more attention to make sure that I lift the blade off cleaning without turning the edge toward the strop.

I think the reason why the face stropping worked with the Opinel #8 was purely because the blade is Convex ground and I was following the convex face contour to primarily polish the face - and since the Opinels have zero continuous edge bevels I basically was stropping the edge too.

Even on Opinels that I had touched up with crock-sticks the "discontinuity" between the slight final edge "bevel" and the original convex face is so slight that the "face" stropping basically gets the "new" edge - does that make sense?

Whereas on a blade with a separate and distinct edge bevel I thought one should hold the blade so that the bevel is flat against the strop.

I just read a hint in using a leather "hone" for finding the correct angle -
lay the blade flat on the leather - and gradually lift the spine while carefully/lightly pushing forward, when the blade is just biting is the correct angle -
one then pulls from edge toward the spine at this angle to strop.

Good hint about marking the blade edge to make sure one is stropping the actual edge -
although is there a way to show if one's angle is too much and one is blunting the edge? -
Which brings us back full circle - on whether edges left at the final stone hone are sharper or not compared to one that has been stropped/polished -
the problem here might be incorrect (or at least inconsistent) stropping?
 
The finest hone you can get is ~8000 micron, polishing pastes are more than twice as fine. So you can't reach the same level of polish on a hone. Lee compared pictures of both finishes and others in his book on sharpening, and the CrO stropped ones were clearly sharper (in a push cutting test).

Of course if you are going for slicing then you don't need to strop, as hones can easily give the final grit. But if you want you can always load up leather with SiC lapping compound of a suitable grit and use that for aggressive edges, or a decent sandpaper.

In regards to angle, ideally you want the most support possible, which is why an Opinel works so well as it is fully supported by the primary grind. This means there isn't a massive change in curvature right at the very edge like you see with heavy secondary beveled knives.

This is why you can see massive changes in stropping if you really hogg off the shoulder of the edge. You don't need to change the edge angle, but since you are making the curvature transitions much more smooth, you don't get the high levels of compaction on the leather and it is more fluid around the edge.

The blades that generally don't respond to stropping on leather well are the ones that need really high force, this tends to put too much of a bend in the leather. For them you really want to minimize the stropping extent as it is very easy to reduce sharpness when stropping by being a little imprecise.

An ideal solution, which avoids all of this is to strop on a *very* hard backing, which doesn't give at all. This of course only creates flat bevels, but avoids all the problems with rounding.

-Cliff
 
How about steeling on a smooth steel?

Steeling is my last step before using a knife.

Usually, after using a leather strop, I steel the knife.

Which one is better? Steeling then stropping; or stropping first then steeling?
 
Steeling can sharpen a knife by smearing out the metal on the edge. However it makes it much weaker and induces faster blunting. It should not be part of a sharpening session, and I would ignore it except as a band-aid solution when you don't want to have to stop to sharpen.

-Cliff
 
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