Thread: Stropping chisels and plane irons

Chromium oxide is cheaply available from Aliexpress, but if you have polishing soaps lying around not doing anything much they will do. The cheap CO can be of varying quality however. There are better quality “crayons” available from Lee Valley etc, these are expensive but can be expected to last a long time. For the stropping, a piece of hard leather is traditional and works very well but can dub the edge if used too hard. MDF can be used providing it is protected from moisture, or a very finely smoothed piece of quartersawn hardwood.

My sharpening system uses abrasive lapping film mounted on float glass and finishing off by stropping, but I also demonstrate a “cheap and dirty” sharpening system using a Chinese 400/1000 grit diamond stone and stropping on MDF with a cheap lump of CO. This gives an edge good enough for all but the finest cuts and/or the most cranky-grained timbers.

I was taught and thus have always used the palm of my hand.

Originally Posted by rod1949

I was taught and thus have always used the palm of my hand.

This I also do from habit to remove any wire edge left from the stone.
Skilsaw is using rougue to freshen up an edge rather than going back to the stone.
H

Originally Posted by clear out

Skilsaw is using rougue to freshen up an edge rather than going back to the stone.
H

I would like to make it clear that I do use the stone for sharpening I ran them over a the abrasive compound to touch things up a bit more after sharpening on the stone to get a better edge and since it did it with the plane irons I stopped getting marks on the timber while planing especially on my No3, when using the chisel to touch up edges after using a hand saw things are looking much cleaner and I am not tearing out wood these are the cheaper fuller branded bench chisels I am talking about so they do take a bit to get them to do their thing and I appreciate my tools alot more knowing I have put in the effort to get them working right with much less effort to use and it is nice to see all the machining marks slowly disappear and make them look decent.

For straight edges, any flat surface will do as a strop to hold honing compound.
For years, I've used strips of food box/breakfast cereal cardboard stock.
I stick that down with dabs of masking tape and charge the inner surface with CrOx
which might be mixed with some AlOx.
For my elbow adzes which have a sweep to the edge, I use a tennis ball as the strop.

Hmm, as someone who has spent more than 50 years chasing truly flat backs on plane blades & chisels, I would strongly recommend you ditch the idea of stropping them. IMO, stropping may be tolerable for plane blades and possibly de rigueur for carving chisels & gouges, but definitely not good for bench chisels. The reason is that regular stropping will cause a slight roundover on both sides of the edge. This won't matter much with plane blades, it will minutely increase the cutting angle for BD blades, & slightly reduce clearance on BU blades. If the rounding gets back too far from the edge, you'll have trouble with shavings wanting to work under the cap-iron. This is unlikely from just moderate stropping, but a definite problem with blades 'flattened' on dished stones or rubbed on compressible surfaces like sandpaper, or excessively back-bevelled. But as long as the back-bevel isn't excessive, there is no real harm done on plane blades.

However, even slight rounding of the back edge of a chisel is likely to cause you trouble. For example, if you try to chop clean, vertical cuts as when cleaning up a tenon shoulder, the ever-so-slight rounding of the edge will cause the chisel to make a slightly convex cut - it may be barely noticeable, but you'll struggle to get precisely-fitting, square, tenon shoulders. And it is absolute frustration on paring chisels, it takes only the tiniest rounding to prevent you from being able to pare a reliably flat surface, the chisel just stops cutting as you slide it over the surface. If you lift he handle to force it to cut, you'll soon have a right old mess.

Best favour you can do for yourself at this early stage is save up & get a couple of good quality diamond plates for flattening & shaping, and a good quality 8,000 stone for finish-honing. You won't need to strop anything after that, there'll be no wire edges left after the 8,000.....

Cheers,

There are two different things going on here (some are a combination of the two)
* folks finish honing on leather as paul sellers does
* true stropping (OK, this isn't Jesus is the only way - but I'll call it true stropping because it's not intended to be honing), which is bare leather or oiled leather removing the wire edge from something that's been sharpened (this is more typical with razors, though the lack of skill in finish razors and using linens leads some people to do the first bullet point on straight razors - it's substandard, but it does get you shaving).

I do the latter, especially with oilstones. The shallower a stone cuts, the more likely there will be an organized wire edge. Edge thinness (narrower final angle) and hardness also have a lot to do with wire edge. The thinner the edge, the greater the chance for a foil, and the harder, the lower the chance. Alloy matters, of course - V11 has an organized and strong foil, pure carbon steel at full hardness has a very fragile foil that breaks off easily.

I'm sure the original stropping on bare leather started due to the need to remove the wire edge and get on with work. Abrasive removal of the wire edge does that plus a little.

I like bare leather and oil better as work generally stops with most tools due to lack of clearance and not lack of sharpness (except with beginners).

Proper stropping will improve any edge, though, regardless of what Brent Beach things. Proper implies that one doesn't take a 1/2 micron edge and hold an iron straight up and drag it across aluminum oxide paste that's not closely graded, but rather removing the foil. It is a lot easier to understand the real value and the nuance in this if you resign yourself to sharpening with a straight razor for a couple of years.

No worries, Ian - most of this stuff will not threaten geometry in any serious way, but the best way to tell if it does is just through use (laziness will guide any user to the way that works the best and easiest without compromising results). If one is rounding bits off too much, eventually an iron will be blunt. There is probably some territory in between perfect geometry and rounding where the iron's toughness outweighs the slight loss of clearance (considering the hone/stropping that most people do).

Bare leather does nothing for a beginner who doesn't manage to finish their work on the stones, but wonderful things for people who do.

(8k does leave a wire edge sometimes, but it probably exits the scene on the first stroke of something. The way to tell whether or not a tool leaves a wire edge is this - lay the bevel on your arm in one direction - shave the hair off. Flip the tool/iron over and see if it shaves the hair off of your arm as well on the opposite side of the bevel. It generally won't right off of a stone. A few light draws on clean leather, and both sides will shave the same. That was the foil that just went off to achieve that. Does it matter for woodworking? Probably not. It would make for a very rough go with a straight razor, though. Actually, an 8K synthetic stone is a rough go with a shave no matter what, and thus the adoption of chrome paste with most new sharpeners, too. A gentler natural stone and a real barber linen followed by shell or horsehide is a better shave and a much longer lasting edge, though. )

Bare leather gets a little bit dirty, if done properly, mostly with metal swarf. This isn't exactly bad, as it's not going to damage an edge if the swarf is filings off of a fine stone (rather than collections of wire edges or abrasive particles). Once an oiled leather strop is dirty, the easiest thing to do is go over it briskly (assuming it's affixed to a backer) with the top side of a card scraper and scrape the leather clean - hard enough to remove anything and everything that could live on the surface of the leather or just within (e.g., to remove any embedded particles).

Abrasive surfaces like al-ox on MDF can actually create a wire edge, too - minimized if light alternating strokes are used to finish the edge.