I recently purchased the Kanayama 30000. The strop arrived in a nice box, well packaged.

First appearances looked very promising. It is obviously very finely crafted.

The leather is absolutely flawless, smooth and silky to the hand. A razor passed on it has wonderful smooth sensation.

Draw I found to be about medium. Not as heavy as a TM latigo, nor quite as slick as my vintage Shell.

The leather in my 30000 is a little on the thin side. It deforms and stretches slightly under use, so it is necessary to hold both components at the same time.



The linen is the disappointing part of it. It is a very heavy , vintage style linen with a most disconcerting wash-board sensation. Not a pleasure to use.

Several tests with the linen show that it isn't as effective as the TM linen, routinely dropping HHT values to a point that the leather alone is not able to recover. I took a chance and sanded the surface of the linen lightly, and this improved the feel under the razor, but it didn't improve the effectiveness, nor did it degrade the function. It did mute the washboard sensation, and makes it feel a little smoother.



All in all, this strop provides fair value. The magic (and the money) are in the leather. The two part strop set, on it's own, may not be adequate to achieve the maximum keenness, and so one may wish to consider purchasing the three part strop set to be assured of achieving the best results.

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-Chris

"Nothing is as it seems... Neither is it any different" -Neal Stephanson

I’ve been using this strop for around a year. It’s my daily strop, I tried different strops in between but always end up going back to this one as my main strop. It’s a top quality product and the leather bit is great. The surface is icy and it could be a bit slippery. I had to condition the leather after 3 months which is unusual but did not since then.



The only disappointing thing about this strop would be the linen side. It’s a very stiff piece of material and not soft at all compared to the piece of leather. After all the stropping I did, it still doesn’t feel like it’s broken in yet…



I found the price a bit high but then, I don’t think that I would buy another strop. If I do, I might either get the same or horsehide if it’s unavailable. This is the shorter(length) strop and find it perfect

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Cheers, Luc - My Gear(Wiki) - Have a question, PM a mod. That's why we're here!