Stropping with Green compound adding scratches to my edge?

J

joepa150

Joined
Mar 15, 2010
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350
My finishing stone on my Edge Pro is a Shapton Glass 8k. It gives me a nice mirror polish with some small scatches.
Today I took a knife that had a decent polish to the edge (stopped with the 8k Shapton Glass) and stropped it lightly on a leather strop loaded with Bark Rivers Green CO compound. According to the Grand Unified Chart, the Bark river green has 0.92 microns compared to the Shapton 8k 1.84 microns. It looks like it added some scratches and dulled the polish a little.

Is this common for this compound or similar Green compounds in the .5-1 micron range?
 
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It could be possible that some contaminants (of greater size than the chromium oxide particles of 0.5 microns) contaminated your strop. Dirt, sand or even other polishing compounds can easily contaminate a Chromium oxide strop.
 
Hello,

Definitely sounds like contamination. Try removing the old compound if you can and re apply. If you have a piece of scrap leather or heavy canvas glue it to a piece of wood and make a new strop, keep it in a clean plastic container. I make all my own strops for a lot less then you can buy them for most of the time. Last time I made 3 of them with 8 oz leather on 3/4"x 3" x 16" red oak for about $20. One with black, one with green, one with white. The white compound gives me a better shine then the green on harder stainless steels, softer steels I cant tell the difference.

Have a good one,

Chris
 
I watched a few videos on stropping and I guess bark rivers green compound is more course then their white or other makers green compound.
 
Gunsnknives said:
It could be possible that some contaminants (of greater size than the chromium oxide particles of 0.5 microns) contaminated your strop. Dirt, sand or even other polishing compounds can easily contaminate a Chromium oxide strop.
Click to expand...

Strop is brand new. The strop is from DLT Trading and the leather is either rough side out or maybe the somehow roughed it up with sand paper or something. It isn't smooth like my other homemade strops. I will apply some of the compound to another new strop I made and check back.
 
Some 'green' compounds won't necessarily be all chromium oxide. Some are a mix or blend, and include other abrasives like aluminum oxide, perhaps at larger particle sizes. The 'stick' compounds are pretty cheap (money-wise), and so the purity of the mix and uniformity of particle size might suffer a bit.

I noticed similar coarse scratches on some of my polished bevels, after using green stick compound.
 
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