Ha, my first strop made it through unscathed. My first nick was on my second strop once I'd had it a while and gotten complacent. Complacency is what really kills strops so I look at it as meditation and try to be present with it, and indeed whenever I'm waving a fragile and very sharp edge around.
I prefer a 2.5" strop. You should be doing a lightly rolling X stroke anyway to ensure good contact and many straight razors aren't quite straight so it's useful to be able to hang the tip off a bit if it's subtly bent. Plus on my 3" strop it sorta bothers me that there's this whole area on the toe side not getting any wear. Maybe if it was a reversible design so I could rotate it as I go...
Oof ya I bet there was a lot of CO poisoning before we understood that. Maybe from forges for hardening?
@[email protected] had a good guess with the metal dust. Maybe lead if they're making wedges there as well or who knows what randomly toxic stuff they were using at that point to dress the leather in stropping wheels and whatever other process they had. Seems lung related somehow though since fans made the difference. I did actually try searching archive.org for that "Fourth Report of the Children’s Employment Commission" back before it got hacked but wasn't able to find anything.
I would be sad as I enjoy this little corner of the server. If you look at the front of this sub it's a well curated (ha I'm biased) collection of interesting tidbits on this topic of some fascination to me and I feel like I'm building on something when I post to it. Whereas if I put it on the main page it's there for a bit then it vanished into the sea of daily and misc threads. And I also find it gratifying that at least a couple of others have gotten the spirit of it and posted things that fit right in.
Doesn't bother me at all that it operates on a scale of weeks and months and this feels more fun than a blog though I suppose it's verging on one. I think it's fairly discoverable too because you'll see these posts when you're viewing the local feed and most who are interested in the sort of thing that's here will have subscribed. This checks out since the main sub has 11 users/day, 36/week and yet this post from 7 hours ago already has 10 points.
So I don't know about varied subs in general but I feel attached to this one.
Coooooool. Thanks for sharing.
This seems like a really nice size, good compromise between heft/lather handling and agility. Plus I like the jimping on it. Somehow I suspect you'll hang on to this one.
And ya, wow, did you stumble onto a hidden cache of underappreciated and underpriced blades or did you set out to expand your collection like this?
I often see people wedging injector blades into things eg. Ender's, Ronson, etc. but haven't given it enough thought to guess if there's a reasonable way to do that here.
You might also consider vintage razors, a lot of them are brass and they've stood the test of time to get this far.
Alternatively, if what you really want is machined stainless you can probably get it for that price from dscosmetic or yaqi on AliExpress. They have many models so it'd be worth searching out some reviews.
I'm unsurprised to see an overlap between meditation and straight razor appreciation. After all, using, honing and stropping my straights are some of my favourite meditations though I still try to keep a more formal practice.
There are also thick framebacks but they're basically just like a light wedge so I think you're right to prioritise the Japanese ones.
I like the look of tapered blades and was lucky enough to score one but it's been at my brother's place waiting for scales for a while now. One day.
Rattlers are neat but also basically feel like a light wedge however I have this one smaller one I quite like, took a nice edge, slight smile, etc. sometimes a razor just fits.
"Lancet" is what Mappin called these, but there have been a few imitators and while I've not tried one quite like that though I have this one with a hollowed out spine that maybe is at least in the same sort of category? Heh, actually that mailcall is pretty topical overall, even has a lather catcher.
Yes, but I have 100 FHS-10 blades and no other razor to use them in😅
Good call on the Audiostrop then, much more appealing than the Oneblade (which I never really felt drawn to in any way) and I liked the noisy feedback from it though I did move mine along as I could get a similar effect from the Wilkinson.
Edit: closing a stray image search tab I spotted this link to an especially nice lancet-ish razor.
Two other strop makers that seem well regarded and I keep almost buying from are Tony Miller https://heirloomrazorstrop.com/ and Torolf Myklebust https://www.scrupleworks.com/
I find the linen component useful for cleaning up a fresh edge and that actual linen seems to work better for this (and my experience mirrors others that it's particularly noticeable with coticule edges). An acquaintance with a bit of leatherworking skill fashioned me one from some webbing I found on etsy from a link at B&B: https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/780497457/linen-tape-by-yard-7cm-wide-tape?ref=yr_purchases