Which strop?

M

maverick3981

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Jun 26, 2009
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I am in the market for cheap, effective leather strop to give a final finishing touch. Can anyone recommend a decent piece?
 
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I got one of these off Amazon ($12.95) on a whim, and have gotten good results with it. 8x2, thin, flat piece of leather on a piece of wood. I use it holding it in my hand. It's "rough side" up, but it's so thin it doesn't seem to matter, and actually gives good feedback on whether or not you're hitting the edge. The Flexcut compound works well. (I do work around the logo, so guess it's not really 8", more like 6 1/2).

There's one option for you.:)
 
A little more expensive than a no name is flexxx


Good guy, backs up his products and come with compounds
 
I made 4 high quality leather strops, 3"x12" for under $20 and less than an hour's effort.


Stitchawl
 
Its difficult to find small pieces of leather where I am, hence wanted to pick one from the shop. Many thanks for all your help!
 
A strop doesn't have to be leather. You can make it out of balsa, MDF, use paper, etc. Personally I use a piece of paper with flexcut gold wrapped around a stone and it works quite well. Especially since it allows me to sharpie up my knife and use it on there to make sure I am removing steel where I want just like when I am using the stone to make sure my angle is correct and adjust accordingly and when I am done I can just toss the paper or use it a few more times before tossing it. Using the sharpie on a knife and then a leather strop personally pains me in the thought of doing that as I imagine the strop will look horrible quite quickly.
 
Sunyata said:
A little more expensive than a no name is flexxx


Good guy, backs up his products and come with compounds
Click to expand...

Flexcut (if you're referring to my post), and the Flexcut Gold compound isn't really a no name brand, their popularity is more in the wood working world though.

Those Flexxxstrops do look nice though. Any experience with the compound he said he came up with?
 
I am quite happy with flexcut gold though the only thing I have to compare it to is some cheap sears green compound. If you search the forum you see a few of our regulars hold flexcut gold in high regard.
 
Bob6794 said:
I am quite happy with flexcut gold though the only thing I have to compare it to is some cheap sears green compound. If you search the forum you see a few of our regulars hold flexcut gold in high regard.
Click to expand...

Far as I'm concerned, Flexcut is the best of the commercial compounds for regular use. You can find finer abrasives, but then you'll have to use multiple strops in the maintenance progression, hone the edge finer on your stones prior to stropping etc. All nice for occasional use tools, but for stuff you want to use often and maintain at a fairly high level of performance is just not practical.

Likewise, there are more coarse abrasives for stropping but also will wind up being part of a multi strop progression, or you're usually better off using a fixed abrasive for any restorative work. Flexcut fits right in the middle, can restore a worn edge yet still refine it to pretty high level. There's a reason its made the way it is and is popular with wood carvers - it works. This material was very inspirational/informative when I set about building my own compound.

You can also use the reclaimed grit from a waterstone or silicon carbide stone on a sheet of paper or paperboard - the stuff broken off the SiC stone can work extremely well as long as there isn't too much oil involved.

As for a strop, simply wrapping paper around a stone is about as simple as it gets. One can also use a variety of soft/hardwoods as well as cork, hard felt, cardboard, one of the softer waterstones, masking tape over steel, etc etc. Plain leather is best used as a final finishing step at high levels of refinement, for applying compound it isn't my first choice anymore and hasn't been for a couple of years.

Here's a thread I started a while back showing the effect of my WB in strop mode, as well as the effect from stropping with reclaimed SiC grit.

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/s...econditioning-a-worn-edge-(with-micrographs!)
 
cbwx34 said:
Flexcut (if you're referring to my post), and the Flexcut Gold compound isn't really a no name brand, their popularity is more in the wood working world though.

Those Flexxxstrops do look nice though. Any experience with the compound he said he came up with?
Click to expand...

I was talking about the generic nameless strops available online, sorry for the confusion. When I was looking to start stropping there are a lot of generics out there and flexxx was just a little more.


I thought about trying it but with no grit info I didn't know where it would fit with my dia-pastes.
 
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