How to use your new strop

First of all if you’ve found your way to this article using the QR code provided with one of our Razorback strops, thank you. We are a small family business and all of our products are made right here in Sawyers Valley by us using Australian sourced materials.

This is a basic beginners guide for those who have recently purchased a strop and aren’t sure where to start, if your a sharpening nerd like myself looking for advanced tips and tricks this ones not for you, however I have other upcoming blogs that will cover the subject in greater detail.

Included with our Leather strops is a QR code that will bring you to this tutorial, 4x adhesive non-stick feet and our contact details. If you have any questions that aren’t covered below feel free to reach out.

Before we get into how to strop, its important to understand when and why we should be taking our edges to leather. The following paragraph is a little lengthy but it will help you get the most out of your purchase, if your not one for reading and just want to see how to drag a knife over leather skip to the paragraph below titled “METHOD:” (Don’t skip it haha...)

Most people who have been down the sharpening rabbit hole before will already know that stropping after your finishing grit can take your edges to a degree of sharpness that’s is hard to achieve on stones alone. A naked strop (without added abrasives) massages the apex into a more uniform shape, while also helping to partially remove small parts of the burr and damaged steel through micro-abrasion and burnishing.

While similar effects can be achieved with high grit stones and honing steels, Stropping is far gentler on a fresh edge and due to its increased deflection over something like steel or ceramic it has the advantage of being more forgiving to subtle angle changes, making it an easy way for even beginners to restore sharpness to knives (or any edged tool) with light to moderate use. If sharpening is not your thing and you don’t feel confident using a honing steel you should definitely give leather (or one of the many other stropping mediums) a crack.

There is two relatively small windows when are strop alone is going to be beneficial, That is when finishing up with your preferred sharpening method, and when you knife is still sharp but has lost its shaving edge.

After putting hair-splitting edges on well over 5,000 knives and dealing with everyone from Home cooks to Head Chefs, Hunters, Butchers & Abattoir workers, I’ve noticed that outside of traditional barber shops and hobby sharpening, strops are no where near as common as they should be.

For the people with little experience a strop can provide them with an easy to use tool with guaranteed results, and while leather products are impractical in a commercial environment where knives aren’t washed until the days out, even a Butcher who has been hanging off a steel for decades will see an increase in edge longevity and the overall life of their knives if they hold off on the steeling until the the leather stops giving them results. An extra step in-between sharpening and honing, its should be thought of as polishing your car after washing instead of going straight to the cutting compound.

Simply put to get the most out of your edges the cycle should be as follows,

Sharpen - keep the shaving edge alive by reviving it with light passes on a strop until you see diminishing results -hone with a polished or ceramic steel and when that stops working - move to a coarse cut steel - then a diamond hone. After all that if done in the correct order and often enough you can usually start the cycle again. It should be noted that once you get down to the diamond steel you are essentially back to the sharpening phase. Or for the home cooks that just want a little more value out of their paid-for edges, pay someone to sharpen - strop when you perceive a noticeable drop in sharpness - try your hand at the steel - pay someone to sharpen.

Below is two typical examples of the results you can achieve from stropping alone on naked leather, if your new to stropping I’m going to assume you’ve never seen the device pictured, I’ll cover what the Brubacher Edge Sharpness Scale is another time but for now just know that it measures sharpness and the numbers on the LCD display correlate to an approximate edge apex width, the lower the number the sharper the knife…

STROPPING AFTER SHARPENING

In the before picture we have measured the sharpness of a freshly sharpened knife that is straight off of a Shapton #3000 grit stone, the knife is already ridiculously sharp however after only 10 light passes per side on some bare leather we have a ~30% increase in sharp. An amazing return for very little effort.

STROPPING TO RESTORE SHARPNESS

While using the strop as part of your sharpening routine is in my opinion essential, this second example is why I try to convert most amateurs and home cooks to strops over steels, at least for maintaining the initial shaving edge.

This image shows a single bevel utility knife in W2 steel that had light to moderate use, being in the family home I can’t accurately account for its level of use but the results speak for themselves. On pre-tensioned clips after 10 medium passes and an additional 10 lighter passes per side we got a measurable increase in sharpness of ~64%.

Considering the ease of the stropping for beginners and the fact that it would be easy to make a 200 BESS knife even duller with sloppy technique on stones or a honing steel you can see why I recommend strops to those frustrated with their sharpening or honing efforts.

OUT OF THE PACKET

It is probably obvious but once removed from the packaging the four adhesive feet should be firmly pressed onto each corner on the underside of the strop. If you plan on using the strop exclusively in the hand or on a guided system such as the Australian designed EZESharp Blade Sharpener you can skip this step.

METHOD:

The following can be summarised as, drag the knife backwards at the sharpening angle moving from the heel to tip… read on for the OCD version or skip to the next picture.

Place your strop on a flat surface or secure it in your EZESharp, be sure that the knifes edge in clean and free of contaminants especially abrasive particles from preceding stones.

Gently lower the heel of the knife onto the strop BELOW the estimated sharpening angle, start to lightly drag the knife backwards while slowly lifting the back of the blade to raise the sharpening angle. You want to close the gap that exists between the apex/cutting edge and the leather until the bevel is dead flat on the strop, you should feel a different sensation as the shoulder stops digging into the leather and the bevel starts gliding, if you go too high the digging sensation will return but it will be the apex digging in, you can have a play about with this while you learn to recognise the feedback, keep in mind stropping at too high an angle too much can round off the edge so if in doubt go lower first.

It can be a little tricky to perceive this feeling on thin knives so if your having trouble start out with either a thick knife or better yet a scandi ground one such as a cheap Mora. The sensation you're looking for is that of a clothes iron gliding over a towel when perfectly flat, strange analogy I know, but hopefully a helpful one to those just starting out.

*ONLY USE EDGE TRAILING/BACKWARDS MOVEMENTS on any strop and avoid excessive lateral movements, you will need to drag the knife somewhat sideways at a slight angle and but it should only be enough to move from the heel to the tip over the length of the entire strop and only when the backward motion exceeds the sideways. You shouldn’t have to think too hard about this but again for the absolute beginners aim to move about 10mm sideways for every 40mm backwards. Take these numbers with a grain of salt, if a motion feels like it may cut into your strop it likely will, deformations or small cuts in the surface of your strop will not render it useless but it will definitely subtract from overall sharpness. If a knife is to large to strop the entire edge in one stroke do it in parts.

While even relatively sloppy technique will get some gains in sharpness so long as you are stropping in the appropriate window of the edges lifespan, for best results you should aim to develop a feel for when you are holding the knife at its correct sharpening angle.

Flip and repeat on the other side… Ideally you will alternate between each side with every stroke but while you're practising doing 5 & 5 or even 10 & 10 is not going to do the edge any harm.

Aesthetic marks are nothing to worry about especially on our hardened leather strops.

AVOID THIS

Tangible scoring in the leather is not good, if you can feel it grab your fingernail you’ve likely lifted the handle to high at the end of your pass and gouged the leather with the tip of the knife (see thumbs down picture), or moved too sideways with not enough backwards movement and sliced the leather. Again not a write-off but for best results avoid if possible.

CONDITIONING

Speaking of Hardened leather, we make and sell a variety of strops including kangaroo tail, hard, medium, soft and suede up with more exotic options also in the works.

If you're unsure on which one to purchase and can’t justify multiple strops just know that it is easier to make a hard stop soft than it is to make a soft one hard.

The standard strops stamped as “Bovine leather” are a little firmer than most cattle strops as they are hot rolled with a touch of beeswax, this results in better feedback due to slightly less deflection and a strop that isn’t super thirsty (it won’t suck up $40 worth of CBN compound every time you reload it if you decide to incorporate abrasives into your stropping, more on that in the next paragraph.)

If upon purchasing one of our Bovine strops or any natural leather strop for that matter and you feel its not as soft as you would like you can can use a variety of conditioners to create a more supple finish, an easy home-made solution is to condition the strop with a mixture of 1 part white vinegar to 2 parts linseed oil.

Whether using chemicals or just from breaking it in over time conditioning is a sure way too change the way your strop feels during use, just keep in mind if aiming for the sharpest edge possible you will have to take the extra/reduced deflection into account when using abrasives and a guided system, for example if your sharpening at 15° per side you may want to drop to 14.5-14.8° when using a softer medium to avoid rounding off your edge.

ABRASIVES

Conditioning your strop may be the best way to change how it feels during use but for changes in performance loading your strop with various abrasives is where its at.

I’m doing my best to keep this blog brief but I could and will write many articles on certain abrasives alone. I get asked a lot what abrasive one should load their strop with and its a hard question to answer without knowing what blade steel your sharpening how much your prepared to spend and what your finishing grit is.

The aim of the game when adding abrasives to a strop is to abrade material, and in order to efficiently abrade a given material without the aid of powered machinery you need to make sure that the abrasive your using is harder than the material your trying to abrade…

At first you might think “well, Chrome oxide is considerably harder than hardened steel, no worries.”

Even though is Chrome Oxide is a good choice for certain steels the problem is is that a lot of modern knife steels have an extremely high volume of Vanadium, Tungsten, Niobium ect Carbides that are suspended in the softer Iron matrix and while the Chrome Oxide will wear the matrix of modern super steels, it is no where near hard enough to abrade these other compounds.

Yes you can technically de-burr super steels with cheaper compounds such and green rouge, you can also sharpen them on low end stones. The problem is, is that its slow, inefficient and you won’t be utilising the steel to its full potential. Obssessing over which abrasive your using for certain steels is sometimes considered over the top in certain circles or not worth the marginal gains but I am true believer of all of those things adding up, if its in your control and you can improve a lot of little bits across the board to end up with a greater result as a whole why not do it? It all adds up and those little things can take your paper slicing edge to shaving or your shaving edge to hair popping…

Inspiring maybe, but not super helpful for those that just want to read a blog and extract a generalised answer, so for those people… 1 micron Diamonds.

If you have 1x Strop, your not interested in buying anymore or experimenting with different edges and you want a one and done abrasive to improve the strops performance, just get a 1 micron diamond spray/paste/emulsion. Why not CBN? Why 1 micron? CBN is one of my favourite abrasives but in my experience unless you also plan on using it in high speed applications where carbon migration or heat is a concern its not worth the extra money. As for the grit size, whenever you load a strop you can always go to a bigger particle size but never smaller, of course there’s nothing stopping you from loading a smaller particle to an already loaded strop, its just counterproductive. Once you’ve put 3 micron diamonds on a strop your knife will end up with a ~8,000 grit scratch pattern, if you then decide you want to try some 1/4 micron diamonds you may get a glint of a 100,000 grit finish but it will be littered with 8,000 grit scores and gouges which will not only detract from the gorgeous mirror finish you may have achieved otherwise but will also cause a non uniform apex. The smaller the edge apex width the sharper the knife, in saying that there is a point of diminishing returns especially for the average user, most people aren’t using 10-15,000 grit stones, go 1 micron diamond.

There is a case to be made for cheaper conventional abrasives and as usual its horses for courses.

If you are mainly stropping crusty old carbon steel knives or even standard cutlery stainless steels such as X50CrMoV15, 1.4116 or 420j (Unless its a $10 Kiwi knife or you enjoy sharpening avoid 420j) and the budget is tight, anything from cheap bars of buffing compound, Chromium Oxide from an Art store, to a tube of Autosol from the hardware is going to improve the strops performance. It will be hard to get an accurate grit size but for coarse go for cutting compounds and for for fine go for shine

…Just get the diamond compound you’ll thank me later.