Reply To: Leather strop: which side up?
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Tools and Tool Maintenance/Restoration / Leather strop: which side up? / Reply To: Leather strop: which side up?
I don’t know if the discussion has maybe already come to a conclusion, but I would still like to add that the kind of leather you use makes a big difference. I have used vegetable-tanned goat leather to start with. That stuff is very thin, but robust. You can almost feel the substrate material through it. The problem I had with it, was the high friction I got with the compound on (worse on the smooth side). In general I find a rougher and harder piece of leather slightly better, because the blades won’t stick so much with the compound on there. Most varieties of combound I’ve used were very soft and therefore I changed to vegetable-tanned cow-leather and stuck it with some stronger adhesive. I now got less sticking of the blades to the strop. I would still like to try sheep leather. It is about as thin as the goat leather, but harder for all I know. I’ve heard people recommend it for polishing knives and so. I’ve had the experience with the harder polishing compounds the abrasion is a bit slower, but I get no sticking on any kind of leather I’ve tried. I find stropping on wood also gets very good results, but it is not so efficient and you might need to clean off the strop more often.