New Strops

I convinced Dan and Spen of JRE Industries to part with some pieces of scrap leather for various projects I had in mind. One of them was to make myself a couple of new strops. Their scrap is of better quality than the remnants I could buy from one of the craft shops or Tandy Leather and I'm helping to reduce their waste so the whole process is very green.

I went up to Home Depot and purchased one 3' long piece of poplar and cut it into various length pieces. I took two similar sized pieces and sanded the ends and laid them over the top of the scrap pieces of leather and turned them until I could get the maximum coverage. I used the Spyderco Paramilitary to cut the leather to size and then glued it down with Elmer's White Glue (it was the only glue I had in the house that hadn't set up on me.) I set the strops leather side down on the counter and weighted them down while the glue set up.

A few hours later, I flipped them over and the leather seemed like it was firmly attached to the wood backer so I prepped the leather and applied black compound on one and Hand American .5 Micron paste on the other. Now I've got two finishing strops that take care of removing wire edges and bringing slightly worn edges back to sharp.

I think the whole project cost me about $3 and these strops will last as long as the leather holds out. JRE uses nice heavy leather so I think it'll be a very, very long time until I have to worry about replacing the leather (unless I do something silly like cut into the leather while cleaning up a Scandi bevel.)

Yeah, that's why I had to build some new strops...

Thanks for reading,


B