When to start stropping?

E

EpicHam

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Feb 4, 2014
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Supposingly , stropping should give you the ultimate finish and clean out all the blurs ,
Add some stropping pastes and you'll have yourself a blade that blinds people with its holy aura.
Now the question is... how fine should you go before you start stropping with leather?
1000 ?
2000?
3000?
8000?

Should you clean your blade of all the waterstone lotion before you start stropping?
Or should you keep the lotion ?

Once you start thinking about how to do something.. the questions just keeps coming
 
Stropping should ordinarily be done after you've reached your desired edge finish (from the stones), and you've verified the edge is fully apexed (normally indicated by the burr's presence along the full length of the cutting edge). It's not really dependent upon the finishing grit itself (aside from preference). With bare leather, I ordinarily do this just for cleaning up the very last of sharpening/compound-stropping debris (very finest burrs & remnants of previous steps), after the edge is essentially 'finished'. At that step, shouldn't need more than a handful of passes (< 5 or so) to get it done.

Depending on individual skill and the steel or stones used, you might not necessarily need or want to strop at all. Some steels won't necessarily produce large or significant burrs as readily as others do, and the stones used to sharpen them will sometimes do a pretty good job cleaning them up on their own (in skilled hands). Some of the more experienced sharpeners here have commented they often don't need to use strops after waterstones anyway, because the abrasive slurry on the stone works well to clean up the edge.

If you do strop, you'll definitely want to clean up the blade prior to doing so. Slurry from the stones or loose grit particles from coarser stropping steps will quickly contaminate your bare strop, if it gets transferred by the blade. An exception: some like to dedicate a specific strop to use the slurry from the stone as the stropping compound. Just keep in mind, you'll not want to do this to a strop that you will want to use 'bare' later on, or with different compound. Once it's contaminated, it'll essentially stay that way, without some major stripping/sanding of the stropping surface to restore it. And that's not a good idea with high-quality bare strops anyway, if the leather had been specially surface-prepped for stropping.


David
 
Last edited:
EpicHam said:
Supposingly , stropping should give you the ultimate finish and clean out all the blurs ,
Add some stropping pastes and you'll have yourself a blade that blinds people with its holy aura.
Now the question is... how fine should you go before you start stropping with leather?
1000 ?
2000?
3000?
8000?

Should you clean your blade of all the waterstone lotion before you start stropping?
Or should you keep the lotion ?

Once you start thinking about how to do something.. the questions just keeps coming
Click to expand...

Not sure what waterstone lotion is, but I'd wipe it off before stropping unless you're stropping on the mud from the same stone.

You're going to get a lot of different answers, but much comes down to what your goal is.
Stropping is really the act of using a loose or semi-loose abrasive on a slightly conformable surface, or at least a surface that can allow partial attachment/infiltration of an abrasive. There is no hard and fast answer.

You could strop at any one of the finish levels you mention, but will depend on a number of factors. Generally when stropping from a largish finish (1000) your stropping abrasive particle should be fairly large. When using waterstones you can claim some of the mud on a sheet of paper, let it dry, and wrap it around another stone for a pretty good match of grinding stone to stropping abrasive. This works at any grit level as a follow up to the stone use. As you go up in finish, the abrasive can be correspondingly smaller.

Other factors - the steel you're working on, what sort of abrasive you're stropping with, how firm is the substrate, is it a finish step, or intended to repair slight damage and wear? Standard stropping compounds range from approx 30u down to sub-micron.

On most steels I stop at 600-800 grit ANSI and strop, but the compound I'm using is a very aggressive blend of larger and smaller particles, and the strop is extremely unyielding - just short of using a bare oak board.

I recommend you get good and consistent with the stones, and then start experimenting. There are a lot of variables that can be tweeked, more to stropping than working with all other fixed abrasives combined (stones, diamond plates, waterstones, etc).

Martin
 
Some people use stropping to sharpen their edges, while others will use finer grit stones. Stones are usually faster and often more accurate.

Personally, I will use stones and sharpening films up to 15,000 grit, then switch (depending on the edge I'm seeking for a particular knife,) to either chromium oxide followed by a finer diamond paste (both on highly compressed cowhide,) followed by stropping on bare Shell Cordovan horsehide as the finishing strop. Regardless of the stropping medium, I rarely use more than 10-20 strokes per side when stropping. I've never found any need for more, especially with a high quality horsehide as the strop.

Many people will strop longer simply because they enjoy the process. For me, stropping is just that; a final step in the process to a better working edge. If an edge isn't already sharp when it comes off the stones, I've done something wrong and won't try to correct it by stropping for an hour.



Stitchawl
 
Hello Epic,

I'm a simple guy, so I keep both sharpening and stropping to basics. On a working edge, Like a field knife or pocket knife, I sharpen on stones up to 1,000, then strop. On kitchen knives, for food preparation, I go up to about 1,800, then strop. In each case, I use a paddle strop, with chromium oxide on the suede side and nothing on the smooth side. I strop very lightly, keeping the bevel parallel to the paddle. Sometimes, I'll just strop a knife while watching TV.

Hope this helps.
 
Much depends on the steel, heat treat and use.

On most of my knives, I use stones to either 15K or 30K, then strop with 1, .5, .125 micron paste, and on some blades, .1 micron paste. I usually "finish" with 3-4 passes LIGHTLY on a "Russian Red" barber strop.
 
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