Thread: Honing chisels with a leather strop

Almost any leather will do these days diamond paste is also used and you can buy leather wheels to attach to grinders etc.

I have a large piece of saddlery leather which is to be made into a flat surface wheel.

A good quality wide leather belt also does well.

thanks for this info, wheelin around. Hope you can help with some more info.

With the belt, what is the action that you use to hone a chisel or a plane blade? Do you just drag the sloping chisel face backwards or sideways along the belt? Would you use a honing guide to keep the correct angle?

Would you glue a piece of leather, say 6" x6", to a board and use that for honing

Where do you get the honing paste for leather?

Like Mum's wooden spoon, Dad's razor strop also kept us kids in check.
Regards

Yep, and don't forget the Castor Oil punishment too

I can't tell you if honing a chisel for fine wood working makes a useful difference or not. Sure, the bright shiny surface looks like a finished job. I don't bother, considering the beating that I give to chisels.
But, it makes a profound difference to a wood carving tool that has a total included bevel angle anywhere between, say, 10 and 20 degrees.

Stropping and honing are synonyms. Depends where you grew up. To me, the strop is the thing, the process is honing with some sort of honing compound. Your mileage may vary.

Once again: you have got to hold the needed sharpening angle right through the entire process. Frustrated carvers often sweep the tool edge up off the strop at the end of the stroke and round off the bevel that they've tried so hard to sustain. Don't. Stop. Lift the tool up and go back to the start. Yeah, it's kind of a jerky, square, box-shaped motion. Go again. When to quit? Well, look at the dang thing. No more than 8-10 fairly gentle passes and I figure it's good enough = test the edge in my "try stick" of cedar. I don't carve fingers so I don't ever test with fingers. OK?

The strop: these are usually some sort of hard leather, best glued to a straight piece of wood then clamped to the bench. The idea is that the leather has enough "tooth" for the honing compound to stick to it.
Soft leather will rebound as the bevelled edge passes over = thus rounding off a 25 degree bevel to 40+, right where you need 25 degrees!!!!! Been there, done that with soft boot leather, threw it in the garbage.
My current flat strop is the wooden stick sort, sold by Lee Valley. That's OK for all my wood carving tools except the crooked knives.
Honing compounds are no more than very fine abrasives: many choices. Iron and copper oxides are 0.25 - 0.5 micron, average size. I use a chromium oxide (green color) which is 0.5 micron nominal particle size. I have no experience with the diamond pastes but read that the particle sizes are similar to the iron and copper oxides.

Let's suppose you want to hone edges and you don't want to buy the leather strop stick thing.
Inside surface of a leather belt, glued to a stick is fine. The key thing is to stay away from soft leather.
Trust me here: the inside surface of breakfast cereal cardboard box on flat wood is just fine. Plus, it's cheap and disposable = no maintenance.

Other stroppy bits: no harm done with one or two passes on the off side of the tool on the strop. I have 6+ 5cm pieces of really hard new leather belt that have carved/angles edges to match the inside profiles for small V tools and gouges. I have a folded piece of thick leather for the bigger tools 15 - 35mm wide.

I have 8 so-called crooked knives, all with some degree of sweep or bend in the blades. Four of them are sharpened on both edges, the others come in right and left pairs. I used a chalked-up chainsaw file to (gently) make them all 12 degrees from whatever they were from the factory.
I have some 18mm pieces of metal pipe. 400 then 800 then 1500 grit sand papers. Last, my strop is another strip of cereal box cardboard on another pipe, electrical tape at each end. Scrubbed on the chrome green honing bar. In fact, I just wrecked two of them today. They were good and black with metal when I peeled them off.
Chocolate Cheerio cereal is pretty good, doesn't go soggy too fast and a small handful of dried fruit makes such a nice garnish.
If you got this far, scroll through "Star's Sharpening Journey", it's a thread up in the wood carving forum. Pictures of nearly everything that I use.

Great information RV. I never paid much attention to stropping; just sharpen, clean and get on with it - but i do not do carving. And as you say - that is where the angle is critical.

Cheers

Wow, this is excellent information gained from a lot of experience- many thanks for sharing RV.

So, I need to go hunting for something with hard hides, eh? Doesn't sound like crocodile skin will do, so Steve Irwin can rest in peace. Should be lots of road kill kangaroos lying around out west each morning. Reckon those wild pigs / boars might just be the answer

Good Morning to you all (I have a 24hr world clock).
I had a Roo-leather wallet = far too soft.
You need hard, stiff leather. . . . somebody mentioned saddle tack = yes!
Some of that stuff is one step down from stone = exactly what you need.
The dimensional stability is very important.

I live in a little village of 550, tucked away in the Rocky Mountains at 53N.
We have almost one of everything here for goods and services.
In the "Woodwork Pics forum, look at "Chasing After Wood" to see where I play.
The scenery is every bit as spectacular as Jasper National Park without the crowds and the prices.

McBride is one of the top snowmobile destinations in all of North America.
You can ever rent Peeps in the gas station! Refill your NOX boost bottles, no problem.
Like propane for a BBQ. The sled heads here run 300+ horsepower. Top hill climbing sled
in the entire valley dynoed at 400+ Hp, he's a consistent winner.
Let's face it = if you can't do 90mph, you can't outrun an avalanche.

I derive great pleasure and satisfaction from wood carving. I've posted quite a few
results in the Wood Carving forum over the last couple of years. In order to do that,
I expect to have the very best edges that I can possibly create. . .
some even from Mora #171 Equus Farrier's Hook knives. All the same to me.

Stropping/Honing. Look. I don't build fine furniture like so many of you do.
I've never been terribly interested despite the results that I see. My power shop tools aren't very good =
$100 for Ryobi 10" table saw, same for the 8" band saw and the 8" drill press.
Those sorts of tools. I run a cheap Dremel clone (42,127 piece discount kit thing).
I make "functional" benches, tables, book cases and so on out of dimension lumber, just as I buy it.
No slice and diceTo me, the product that
comes off the bench is what matters. Some of my benches and tables actually get stained/painted.
Most don't. What's another couple of 12mm holes in the work bench anyway?

To need to hone a chisel or a plane blade, you people will have to do the necessary experiments.
I will retire to the benches with a glass of good wine and watch. I would like to know if it matters.

Give me my 30oz, lead-core carver's mallet and my 5/35 Pfeil gouge,
You wanna see chips 15cm long? I can do that for 90 minutes at a stretch.

RV has detailed it all.

What no old saddles or belts about the farms machinery sheds

Diamond Paste H&F or Carba sell a tube maybe even Gasweld or Blackwoods. If there is a Repco or auto store about ask if they have Valve grinding paste.

Thanks for the endorsement. All I can do is explain my means to an end.

My chunk of chrome green was sawed off a poured and cast ingot.
Some sort of waxy stuff. Harder than a cold bar of soap. Smells nice.
Friction melts it = the faster I streak it on the leather or cardboard,
the more that comes off. LV sells it. Don't recall what my supplier was.
I have enough for 300 years. The little file for a cleaning comb is valuable,
I need to see the black of the metal coming off.

Absolutely the worst case scenario = find an art store and buy a tube
of the very cheapest artists' oil paint = Chrome Green.
Exactly the same thing but snot-runny.

I strop now after many years of not believing it made a difference. It depends on what I'm doing. If it's rough style work I don't bother. If I'm doing joinery I have my strop on the bench and use it regularly.

Even the hardest leather curls under the edge so keep in mind it will change the angle of your secondary bevel. People argue that stropping is only valuable if it is done under power because of this curling effect. I tend To keep my chisels and plane blades ground at around 30deg for this reason and sometimes power strop or hand strop.

Ben you are so right about the leather curling. However, I got a brand new belt. So stiff, you could stand it up against the wall. The best yet. Horse tack leather ought to be good if you can get it. Glued to a stick.
Other than that, I've slowly learned not to put so much pressure into the honing process. 10 light strokes instead of 5 heavy ones. That works better. Cardboard on a pipe is the only way to do the crooked knives but I go softly and at 12 degrees, I got what I needed.

"Horse butt" leather is one of the preferred types for strops for woodworking tools. I found some on ebay, but also bought a couple from Tools for Working Wood. Although some will use these without a backing, that is, just holding them flat on a bench top, I prefer the security of gluing them to hardwood, where there is no chance of any curling - which would dub the edge.

For a few years I stopped stropping edges reasoning that a 12000 grit waterstone should be better. However, over the past 6 months I have returned to stropping chisels, and have noticed a definite improvement in the edge. This may be simply due to he removal of wire since I am only using bare leather.

Regards from Perth (currently Sarasota, USA)

Derek

Believe me, I was most reluctant to try breakfast cereal box cardboard as a strop loaded with chrome green. There's nothing in the marketplace to hone crooked knives like cardboard on a 18mm pipe. Half my knives are double beveled and that makes short work of a conventional leather strop!