Ironing board linen as a strop.

It started as a place to practice stropping with a beater blade, trying to figure out how to flip the blade over on it's spine, which I still haven't mastered. Then it occurred to me. This may be stable enough for sure nuff stropping. My wife caught me defiling her ironing board and forbade me access But this afternoon, I found my son's mini ironing board he used in college. I haven't a strop yet because I'm learning to do this too close to Christmas but would the surface of the ironing board be appropriate for stropping even if I did have one. I could put a little compound on the cover and the foam backing would provide a little 'give' as if I had a good grip on the end of a linen strop. What is the wisdom of the group?

Respectfully submitted
RB

I would not put anything on it. Just strop on it as long as there are not any metal or hard protrusions. Denim from old jeans and folded newspaper also works.

Lately, I've been having fun stropping my kitchen knives on the white pages section of a phone book. Bet it would work fine for razors too.

Avenolpey said:

Denim from old jeans and folded newspaper also works.

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IME these two mediums may be good for practice, but I could not get anything out of them for edge improvement. Next time you have an edge that you know you could bring up with linen, try a few hundred laps on newspaper and see if you get anywhere. Then try 50 laps on linen.

I had the idea of supplying D-rings to newbies so that they could easily make hanging newspaper strops with just a stapler. After testing the actual performance I decided that I would be doing them a disservice.

A stripe of denim taped to a bench works great.

Definitely sounds like something to try! I am a big time DIY kind of guy so these things appeal to me.

Be careful when using abrasive compounds on a flat substrate with any notable give. Unless you're experienced - I think it's very hard to approximate the correct pressure and you can easily turn an accurate bevel/edge into a very sharp edge that doesn't shave all that well. While the concept is sound, executing the idea will take a bit of skill and a gaffe might require a honing.

If you have a hanging linen strop - all you need to do is keep the tension high and you will, effectively, have a hard substrate if you keep the blades pressure light enough. I'm not talking about white knuckle tension here, just enough to keep it taught.
Using a shorter strop is ideal here - keeping a 12" strop taught is a lot easier than keeping a longer one 'flat'. While it seems counter-intuitive; in practice the concept holds water. Shorter strokes are easier to control, and shorter material length is easier to concentrate on and it'll have less natural 'stretch' too.
If you're still unsure - get a 2" wide piece of wood, glue some webbing to it and you're done. An old cotton webbing belt will work. Cut it down and fix it to a piece of whatever 2" wide scrap wood you can find at Home Depot.

I use 2" wide webbing for testing pastes and I just lay it on a scrap piece of wood that's a little wider. I just hold in place with my thumb at one end.
A bit of glue on the ends and edges will do the same thing though.

Aah! I see where you are going with that. Makes perfect sense. I think the balsa and marble slab idea I saw in Slash McCoy's tutorial can 'beginner proof' stropping. I can introduce a bit of compounds to speed the process a little bit. The only fly in my ointment is that my .1 micron is not a suspension rather is a powder. Should i sprinkle a bit like fairy dust on the balsa? How do I use it as opposed to the paste?

Mix it into mineral oil. works fine. Just don't let it clump up, keep stirring it with a toothpick.