Question re: cloth strops, chromium oxide

[Brassplyer]

I have a Duke City strop with buffalo hide and two cloth strops - one coarse, one tighter weave. When applying a chromium oxide bar to the cloth how saturated does it need to be? Does it need to look like it's painted with chromium oxide or is a green patina enough?

Also when do you use the coarse vs the tighter weave?

Thanks.

 

[Legion]

Lighter the better. A little dab’l do ya.

Having said that, when using pastes I generally recommend putting it on a flat surface, rather than a hanging strop. You should get longer before the razor has to see a proper hone.

 

[H Brad Boonshaft]

Paint the paste on in 3-inch X’s, which is more than enough paste and the X’s give you uniform coverage.

You do not need 100% coverage and in fact too much paste is counterproductive and messy.

More importantly do not paste hanging strops attached to your leather or you will contaminate/paste your leather, and it can never be completely removed.

Strops can have a micro progression or with linen one strop to clean the razor and another to polish.

So, a separate dedicated pasted strop is a much better option. The substrate does not matter that much, it’s the paste that does the work, you can paste a piece of cardboard or a strip of brown paper bag.

And, like most folks, you will find that there are better shaving edges than pasted edges, but if your main strops are pasted or contaminated, you will be buying new strops.

 

[Gamma]

I've been using pastes on hanging linens with a coupla test razors for years without issue. The idea is to use the linen like you would use a leather strop; keep it taught. Too much slack in leather can be problematic, so can slack in the linen. Put it on whatever, there really is no proven advantage to one way or another. Leather loom strops are popular in Europe, they work great too.

I would say that having a pasted strop in close proximity to a clean linen or leather strops might be challenging in that the stuff likes to 'creep'.
I use seperate simple cotton webbing strops, tight weave, works well. The nubs in the weave seem to be beneficial.

As for application, you want a couple of streaks, not at all saturated. I like to say 'a light dusting'.
With use the stuff spreads out a bit but you really don't want anything that even approximates 'saturated'. There are way too many YT videos showing thoroughly coated strops. It's a bad practice unless someone is intentionally trying to create harsh edges.

A lot of what is sold as Chromox online is actually a mix of aluminum oxide and Chromium oxide or green dye.
Chromium oxide comes in a lot of forms, some might be good for tools but maybe not so hot for finer edges.