Thread: Honing chisels with a leather strop

Hi Dengy

I have no doubt that the green compound works well. It is best suited to one who hones to about 6000 then takes the edge further this way. I find a bare leather is sufficient coming after a 13K waterstone as this is removing vestiges of wire edge. So more of a finishing than a honing medium.

Regards from Perth

Derek

The North American, the European and the Japanese grit grading systems are different = fact.
Iron and copper oxide honing grits are (nominally) 0.25 - 0.5 micrometer.
Diamond pastes are (in theory) about 0.25 micron but they don't crush and give you finer grades as you work into it. Chromium Oxide (green) grit is about 0.5 micrometer which might translate to 50,000 grit.

I'm fussy about my carving tools. I go from 4K water stone to chrome green. I go from 1500 grit automotive W&D paper to chrome green. In either case, I see featureless cuts in soft woods such as my favorite = western red cedar (Thuja plicata). That is what I expect to see. Recently, I find that this whole business works just as well for north american hardwoods. The only difference is to take more shallow cuts.

What is wrong with using your own personal built in strop that you carry around with you at all times.
I can recall in the years gone bye the many old time carpenters, joiners and wood workers would always use the palm of their hand to strop their plane irons and chisels when sharpening, with constant working and handling timber their hands would become like a piece of well worn shoe leather.
Even now I still will strop my plane iron or chisels if I cannot find a suitable means of removing the burr.
Bye the way over the many years ( 60 +) I have nether cut my self using the palm of my hand by stropping , it seemed to become second nature as I said just like a piece of old shoe leather.
Cheers
Malcolm Eaton.

OK Malcolm, I confess. I wear $5.99 leather gloves for wood carving. Many reasons and saftety is NOT one of them. Over the course of a year, my carving gloves become quite dirty despite never using them for anything else at all in the shop.

Got just a couple of skinny shaving cuts with a skew to clean off a face. I can tell that the edge is going away. Flip-flop wipe the tool on the palm of my glove and finish the job. I agree totally = it is amazing how that works so well.

Well, I got a piece of tough leather, soaked and clamped it for 24 hrs to get it uniformly flat, then used Contact Cement to glue it to a block of wood, clamped for 24 hrs too.

Rubbed the green chrome crayon all over it, but am having trouble with it clogging in little lumps on the leather surface ( see photo below) - not quite what you want when honing after using a 6000 water stone.

Tried scraping it off with a chisel, but the leather surface tended to tear in places if the chisel edge digs in. The lines are biro lines when estimating how much I would need while in the leather shop

Can anyone please suggest a way of applying the crayon so that it doesn't result in little lumps?

None of my strops are perfectly flat even with the best of efforts. It does not effect the function of them. There are break in tips with tour strop and everyone's set up is different.
Heat and friction is a good start. Use a hand plane and smooth up a piece of scrap and rub it flat using a quick forceful motion. You want to flatten and heat the waxy compound. Don't use a piece of wood that has been sanded as the grit left in the wood from the sandpaper will find it's way into your strop. Break the edges on the strop so it does not scrape the compound off.

If you live in a cold climate or have very dry or hard compound, some people mix a drop of neetsfoot or baby oil on the compound and work that in as well.

Once you have a good coating as a base material down on your strop you only need a tiny amount of compound to re charge the strop. Occasionally you will give you strop a good scrape down and start over but that's very very rare. I use mine a lot and can't say I have done them for a few years.

Stropping really does work. I didn't believe it at first until trial and error came into play. You get hooked on it! I do both power and hand stropping now.

Oh, some people say a base coat of bees wax or candle wax works as well for a base coat on your strop. I have not tried this.. Worth a shot.

Don't get hung up on it being a 'surface plate' flat, or even flesh or fur side of the leather, the both work. The smooth leather is only appropriate for straight razors as the cutting edge is so very thin that anything can deflect it. Woodworking tool edges are much thicker.

1. The chrome green is suspended in some sort of waxy stuff = the faster I streak it, the better it melts off and coats the strop. Don't be too concerned about lumps, you should not need to press down so hard that they matter.

2. I have a 15cm/6" mill bastard file. I use the corner edge of that file as a rake, a comb, to gently, gently scrape off the blackened honing compound.

3. Crayon? ###? If it come off lumpy, it is inferior. If it comes off lumpy, use the file/rake to get rid of the big lumps. Mine was cast as a bar/ingot and cut into chunks the size of my fist.

4. The coating with honing compound does not need to be so uniform as the exquisite painting of an exquisite plastered wall. You need to see the black streaks of metal coming off the tool edge.

Thanks Ben Dono, I tried out your suggestion and rubbed with a piece of timber that had recently been through a thicknesser.

The end result was that some of the waxy crayon stuff was absorbed by this rubbing board, so that in effect it was quite smooth and glided easily over the leather, not much friction heating generated. The waxy lumps, however, were spread into long thing streaks that you could still feel, but as both you and RV say in the posts above, this does not matter

Many thanks to you both for your posts

Can you please confirm that you only drag the chisel backwards along the angled face of the chisel (unlike sharpening on a water stone with a honing guide where you push the chisel in both forward and backward directions)

and

when finished, rub the back of the chisel a couple of times along the leather, holding it flat

found this excellent web site here that answers my questions above

Aghh, I see. I tend to scribble my compound on across the width as well as across it's length. This might help with the globs that are building up. I'm surprised the friction method did not work for you. It always fixed my new strops up quickly.
I have come across others that say no compound past 8000 is necessary.
Each to their own on that one. I feel it makes a big difference with my sharpening.
One of advantages of the "traditional" stropping compounds is the grit clogs quickly and also breakes down to a finer grit rapidly. An example of this is the veritas green stropping compound that was recalled recently due to an aggressive starting grit that someone discovered when they grilled the manufacture on the actual grit size. The product performs brilliantly and I feel it it does break down to a much finer grit than can be achieved with stones alone.
The real benefit of stropping with compounds comes out when you power strop.
I then maintain an edge with a charged hand strop.

Just me, I suppose.
I never "scrub" my carving tools on stones or the strop.
Pull strokes only. I can't imagine ramming a $75 gouge into a stone. Never understood the logic. But the risk is there for me as I do all by hand and have no crtuches of any kind for tool suppport.

If and when the sad day comes that I have to actually "repair" an edge, then the edge gets scrubbed on my oil stones until I get past the damage. Then pull strokes to re-establish the basic bevel which is commonly 20 degrees for wood carving tools.

Admittedly, pull strokes become a puzzle, trying to hone a double-edged, Haida-style crooked knife. Consequently, I'm come around to using pieces of 18mm aluminium tubing with the sharpening/honing stuff wrapped around.

I cant say I have ever stropped only on a stone. What grit do you start at when you begin pull stroke only on your carving tools?

Because of the sweep of a crooked knife, my last "grit" is 1,500 automotive W&D paper, wrapped around an 18mm piece of aluminum tubing. Next is a strop, cereal box cardboard on the same kind of tubing with chrome green rubbed into it.
The knife handles are clamped to the bench and I work the bevels at 12 degrees.

For all my other carving tools, a few passes on a 4,000 grit water stone then a flat leather strop with chrome green.
Unless there's been really serious damage, I never touch my carving tools with an oil stone = no reason to do that.

Chromium oxide (green) is an abrasive with a nominal particle size of 0.5 micrometer. The black that you see is metal, finely divided metal particles, ground off the tool bevel by the chrome green. CG is running approx 45,000 - 50,000 grit. Diamond pastes are 0.25 micron or so. Iron and copper oxides run 0.25 - 0.5.

I am fussy about edge quality to maximize my satisfaction in wood carving. The problem with many websites is that they have no vested or economic interest in what they put up. All I have is some years of doing what actually, in my shop, works. You can see all that in "Star's Sharpening Journey." I'm confident enough now to tune up edges for other wood workers. And some banged up bevels on tools for resale by the actual vendor!