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Controversial (Touch-up) Strop

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  • #38902
    MarcH
    Moderator
    • Topics: 74
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    This idea we debated a while back on this forum but I went through with it anyway. This is my kitchen touch up Strop:

    Kitchen-Strop-small

    By my way of thinking if a knife steel or ceramic knife steel, used for touch-ups between sharpening, is round in shape, why wouldn’t a round strop work?  Using the strop, in the kitchen, while holding it up in the air, keeps it away from often cluttered food holding surfaces.

    I made my strop fairly large in diameter out of a semi-long piece of wood closet hangar bar.  My thought was the large diameter would increase the surface area the knife touched during the stropping motion.  The handle is long enough to keep my hands a safe distance away from the sharp knife edge while facilitating a long continuous edge trailing stroke across the strop’s length even with the longest kitchen knives.  The large diameter handle allows a solid hand grasp so I can apply as much pressure to it as I want while emulating the touch-up motion of a knife steel while holding it out in front of me.  I always found a flat leather/wood block strop difficult to use.  I couldn’t apply enough pressure to feel it was being effective without resting the block on a surface.

    Strop-end-small

    I haven’t observed any rounding of the apex or other adverse results associated with stropping.  All I can say is it works very well for me, is easy to use and is great for quick touch-ups between sharpening.  A few quick bilateral edge trailing strokes restores the sharpness I’m lacking.  I use it dry with no stropping compound so it’s wipe and go.

    Hence, the evolution of my “round kitchen knife strop”.

    Marc
    (MarcH's Rack-Its)

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    #38905
    sksharp
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    <h4>I use a stropman strop for maintenance Marc, four sided, fuzzy side up, with all four of his compounds and he also sells a round three sided strop with a handle much like yours. Your strop would certainly straighten the edge of the knife with just a few passes with no compound and I would think a lot better for the knife edge than a steel. Nice</h4>

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    #38908
    Mark76
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    It looks well made. How easy is it to keep a proper angle when touching up your knives with a round strop?

    I have long used a strop for touching up my knives between WE sharpening sessions. Nowadays I am using a XXF Spyderco ceramic stone, which works great. I usually sharpen my Japanese kitchen knives at 15 degrees and this is exactly the angle of the Spyderco stone.

    Molecule Polishing: my blog about sharpening with the Wicked Edge

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    #38913
    MarcH
    Moderator
    • Topics: 74
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    I do use it just like I would if I were using a ceramic steel just with pushing and pulling edge trailing strokes, held up out in front of me. I try to hold a relative angle a little steeper than the angle I know I sharpen the knife at. I have found that being able to roll the strop under the knife as it passes up it to be helpful in maintaining that relative angle and position. I have viewed the knife’s bevel under USB mscope, both before and following stropping and it appears the edge is smoothed, cleaned of some of it’s raggedness or toothiness and it shines it up. It does certainly cut better after stropping.

    I used a new Japanese Chef Knife, I recently purchased, last night, first cut out-of-the-box, to prep my dinner. The first two cuts this knife felt disappointingly dull. I gave it about 8 bilateral edge trailing strops and the next cut put a smile on my face.

    This first pictures is the bevel right out-of-the-box, never used: Fu-Rin-Ka-Zan-Bevel
    The second pictures shows the same knife, same bevel at roughly the same place on knife after it was stropped, used, washed and put-up over night:After-Stroping-and-use

    I think the difference is unremarkable. I haven’t observed any visual downside to stropping with this round kitchen strop just improvement to my knives cutting performance between sharpening and being able to prolong the time I can enjoyable use the knife between sharpening.

     

     

     

    Marc
    (MarcH's Rack-Its)

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    #44477
    Anonymous
    Inactive
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    Just saw this interesting thread. I made some strops with dumpling rolling pin and I use them to touch up recurve blade. Of course they worked.

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    #44478
    MarcH
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    I have since gone back to using a typical strop, Stropman Big Boy , in a conventional manner.  It is easier to get consistent results on kitchen knives.

    Marc
    (MarcH's Rack-Its)

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    #44480
    sksharp
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    I agree MarcH, I also use a StropMan Big Boy strop as well as his large 2 sided strop quite often. I had tried hand stropping a couple times thru the years but my sharpening was so poor that I don’t think the strop would have helped even if I knew what I was doing then. Starting with a Smith’s sharpener I started to realize the benefit when I finally produced an edge that could benefit from the strop. Done correctly the hand strop is way easier to get results on than hand sharpening, at least for me. The combination of a WE sharpener and a StropMan strop can be an awesome combination. All strops are not created equal and in my humble opinion StropMan are the best.

    The strops are great for maintenance as well. They do a good job on knives that don’t have bad damage but are losing a little in sharpness, can bring the edge back time and time again without re-honing, and take less metal than touching up constantly with a stone no matter what the grit.

    StropMan also offers a round three sides strop. With the point of contact between the blade and strop being so small a more aggressive compound might be appropriate for this type of strop. With that small of a contact point it just seems to me that a round strop might take quite a while comparatively speaking and require more precision. Probably be a good tool for severely recurved blades that are difficult on a flat strop all though I don’t think you would use a round strop much if you had a flat one as well. I can see a use for them if you have the need for it though.

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    #44481
    Organic
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    Here’s an interesting idea; Make a fixed angle stropping setup similar to the Spyderco Sharpmaker. It seems like that cold be easily done and would allow for good control of the stropping angle without the need for a clamp.

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    #44482
    sksharp
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    If you support one end of  the strop to create a particular angle you should be able to use it similarly to the Sharpmaker, all though horizontally instead of vertically. The V shape of the Sharpmaker done with strops would just require one to start at the bottom and draw the knife in an upward motion instead of down. That is an interesting idea Organic!

    #44483
    sksharp
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    I want to be clear, I use the WE strops on all but a few of the knives that I do. The angle control along with the variety of mediums make them impossible to beat in my opinion. I just find the hand strop quicker for maintenance and fun to play with, it’s a good tool to have.

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    #44484
    Organic
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    I totally agree that you simply can not beat the precision of the WE for stropping, but a fixed angle stropping setup like I described would be really convenient for quick touch ups of knives. In fact, I bet it would be pretty easy to make a set of triangular dowels that fit the Sharpmaker slots. You could then mount leather to each of the three sides and load them with three different types of compound.

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    #44485
    sksharp
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    Could work!

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