Stropping the AutoStrop blade

[BrianK]

The other day I got my brand new strop in from Neil Miller, Nice work, nice kangaroo strop.

I put it on a hook and work it through the AS and proceed to stroping the blade. I'm taking my time and the blade is flipping back and forth as it's supposed to. I call the wife to see this little gem in action. She's watching and IT FAILED TO FLIP OVER!!!

Can anyone guess how quickly a stropped Feather blade cuts clean through a strop? So here I am with a brand new 2 piece strop. It lasted about a minute in actual use.

I couldn't figure out why the malfunction occurred and I just love a mystery to solve. Heck, the razor does the mechanical action! I glued the pieces back together and I tried it again. It happened 3 more times. I grab another AS and try that one. The strop goes through the roller significantly tighter. The razor does its flipping routine w/o a bobble. I try all of the *** in inventory and they all have that same snug fit of the strop and all work fine.

I concluded that I just got "lucky" and picked the one razor out of 5 that had enough wear to make the fit loose on the strop so that the malfunction could occur.

I'll probably try this again at some point, but for now it's on a back burner.

Maybe someone who knows what a stropped edge looks like to the naked eye will chime in. I examined the edge and I could see an almost mirror edge to the cutting edge. I also saw some spots that didn't look like the edge was "straight". I'm guessing where the blade hit imperfections in the strop?

 

[Haiku]

I've done that with an Ever Ready stropper to an Ever Ready strop. I find that if I pull the stropper very slightly "down" perpendicular to the strop so that there's just a bit of tension in it, the blade more easily flips. I've learned to go slow to ensure that the machine flips the blade.

 

[BrianK]

Yeah, I figured that out about the down pressure too. Far too late. Never again with that particular razor anyway. I'll either sell or PIF it and make sure the new owner knows my experience and suggest that it only get used with throw away blades.

 

[Slivovitz]

I learned to take it slowly after putting a couple of little nicks in one of my two strops. It turns out to be a moot point anyway, though, as it seems that the strop actually dulls the blade. Of course, I may be doing something wrong, but the whole point of the automatic mechanism is that it gets the stropping angle right for you.

 

[Haiku]

I learned to take it slowly after putting a couple of little nicks in one of my two strops. It turns out to be a moot point anyway, though, as it seems that the strop actually dulls the blade. Of course, I may be doing something wrong, but the whole point of the automatic mechanism is that it gets the stropping angle right for you.

Easy to dull a blade if you strop incorrrectly. If you pull down too much on the stropping machine and the strop isn't pretty much flat, what happens is that the strop will dull the blade. Same is true when stropping straight razors. If the strop is allowed to have too much slack in it, it will dull the blade.