I think they're called bench strops

[brothers]

I've made a couple of welcome additions to my strops over the past several months. I bought a Hess linen strop and it seems to be instrumental in maintaining the edge, before I go to the leather strop. I also bought a couple of bench strops, one balsa with CrOx, and one with hard felt and 0.025 diamond spray on it. The most recent thing I did was to make some bench strops with smooth leather on them that I got from Tandy.

My plan is to put some CrOx on one, .05 diamond spray on one, and to keep the third one plain. A few months ago I decided that it's just not precise enough in my particular case to use the hanging strop, so I lay them along the edge of a desk and strop the razor there. I have no complaints with the ever-improving results I've been getting over time.

The two I bought and the three I made are red oak lumber, 1 x 3 x 11 5/8, with the leather glued on with contact cement, and a non-skid foam pad glued on the back.

[matt321]

I think there is a tendency for bench strops and paddle strops to cup. If the edges lift or thicken the blade will tend to contact the edges more than the middle. I put a tiny speck of water in the middle of my strops to test. If stropping doesn't seem to smear the droplet then there is some cupping. At least one of my wide hanging strops fails this test as well.

[brothers]

As a follow-up. This past weekend I woke up really early on Sunday morning, and decided it would be a lot of fun, (really?) to hone and strop all of my SRs, so I did. There are only 13 of them, and it took 9 hours. This included the unnamed razor I've recently been having trouble with. Maybe in a day or two I will perform the test shave with it to see if the overhoning was successfully corrected this time around.

I have three main points that I wanted to address in this post.

First, I finally purchased my .25 and .5 diamond sprays from SRD, with great prices and lightning fast shipping I might add, and applied it to two of the recently acquired bench strops. The .5 went on the hard felt strop and the .25 went on one of the leather bench strops I made last month.
I used my vintage canvas, linen, and horsehide strops also.

The second point, regarding the unnamed razor, I followed Chris Moss's advice and removed the "fin" by running the edge across a plece of wood. It's interesting to note that the fin near the heel of the blade was so pronounced that the wood didn't remove it, it just bent it over, and formed a ridge that I could feel when I ran my thumb across it. Hopefully the test shave will yield positive results. If the honing's OK and the steel's OK, both of which I trust are OK, and the razor still refuses to shave, then I think I will follow some advice given elsewhere (the Gentleman's Parlor?) and send it to Ken at RupRazor for an analysis and possible remedial honing and/or advice on what to do next. Let's all thilnk positive.

Third, I was fortunate to have picked up a very badly needed Loupe from Hong Kong, to replace my $25 Radio Shack microscope, that allowed me to get a MUCH better view of the edges of all 13 razors, before and after the process. I was having a huge problem with the (60X to 100X) Radio Shack Microscope because I'd been told that it is standard practice for the image to be upside down and backward, meaning that if I move the razor east, the image moves west, up means down, etc. That made it nearly impossible for me to be able to get my hand, eye, and brain to work in reverse. That was VERY frustrating. What a difference the new 60X lighted loupe made. I got it for a bid of $.01 (yes, one US Cent) plus $6 shipping from Hong Kong. Lightning fast delivery, about 4 days. and to my great delilght, when you look at the blade, east means east, and up means up. The image I see through the loupe is moving in the same direction with the same orientation as the naked eye. Oh, my, what a relief.

I tested the vintage Wostenholm Pipe razor yesterday, and it passed the shave test. Today I'm going to give the call to the Hammeshfarr Cif. Solingen #120 "Schwimmer" 7/8 full hollow razor, and we'll see how that turns out.

[matt321]

We'll be curious of the results of this honing onslaught. All good, all bad, or mixed results.

My results are usually mixed. I have to fiddle with pasted strops and such for some of the edges to be right.

[drmoss_ca]

If an edge has a ragged, overhoned edge that doesn't come off with softwood, I draw the edge across some rounded glass, like the side of a jam jar. That gets you a fresh start.

Chris

[brothers]

We'll be curious of the results of this honing onslaught. All good, all bad, or mixed results.

My results are usually mixed. I have to fiddle with pasted strops and such for some of the edges to be right.

Just completed the test shave with razor #9, and surprisingly, it is the best test of all, so far. I didn't even test one of the razors, I don't like the look of the edge, so I'm going to reset the bevel before I even use it. It is an old Rodgers & Sons, a superb heavy razor, that shaves really well (when the edge isn't boogered).

[brothers]

An update. Six of the 13 tested OK, with some needing a bit more work on the strops. The others need more work, but I'm in no hurry on those.

One, an anonymous razor, got itself retired permanently. I'm not getting rid of it, I'm just declaring it a non-shaver as far as I'm concerned. I'm not wasting any more time or money (already spent $60 having it sharpened by the best in the country, in my opinion) sending it out for more paid head-scratching and mumbled obscenities, only to result in maybe 2 decent shaves before the edge craps out again.

It's truly a lost cause. It's beautiful and has a nice story behind it. So it's looking like a million bucks on the shelf. Maybe some day my heirs will have some spare time and money to waste on it.

My best razor, the best of the test shaves, is the horribly ugly 1810 Wade stubtail. The next two best razors are half hollow Torreys. One came from a flea market and the other from ebay.