It’s kind of funny that I always seem to be thinking about straight razors.
I am eagerly awaiting a razor exchange with a member of the SRP. I sent him my Thiers-Issard sharpened to 30K on the Shapton Glass Stones. We discussed the terms for evaluating each others blades, and we agreed that we were to send the razors shave ready in order to “keep it real”.
For me, this simply meant touching up my razor with a couple of strokes on the 30K glass. As for my exchange partner, he uses natural stones, and finishes with stropping. I am very excited to use a razor that has been finished on natural stones.
With the advance of synthetic sharpening stones, sharpening anything to 8K and finer is as easy as doing a Google search and using a credit card. To me, if you can sharpen up to 30K, or .5 microns, stropping is a little redundant (and maybe even counterproductive??) With the internet, you can now secure natural Nakayama stones that, as my exchange partner said, rival the 30K. In fact, it is this very statement that made me wonder about why he is going to strop his razor after using this stone.
This got me thinking – with the commercial availability of stones that go to 30k, or .5 microns, is stropping really necessary anymore? Back in the day, when sharpening stone and barber hone technology weren’t nearly as technologically advanced as they are today (I’m not saying that they were bad, though), I can see using stropping to clean up an edge, and to even mask some imperfections, as stropping rounds over (or convexes) an edge over time (actually improving it before it becomes too convex). But gone are the days of only having Arkansas or India stones, which at best their best, are not good enough on their own.
Of course one can strop as a form of sharpening on several different strops loaded with CrO2 or diamond pastes that go as high as .25 microns, or 60K. If this were the only method a person used, I can see that being effective. The argument that the edge will eventually need to be reset on a flat stone comes into play, though.
I guess the tradition of using strops is so well ingrained in our straight razor history that it will never go away. Besides, this technology has only been available in the last few decades. Just a thought…….