A Simpler Stropping Routine:

After chatting with my honing guru on Face Book and seeing first hand under a 30X by 21 MM jeweler's loupe how little is actually needed, I've decided to tone my stropping routine down and go even easier on my straight razors. I made a false move during stropping yesterday and slightly roughed up the edge a bit. I also ended up having to perform a touch up on my Norton 4/8K water stone because of it. After glassing both razors and seeing that I fixed the edge somewhat close to what they were when they arrived, I performed a new simple stropping routine which appears to have worked. Before this stropping routine was performed, I saw that both razors had a nice clean edge that could use a tiny bit of refinement. The edges had an uneven mirror polish to them and the haze was barely visible. I also saw a few tiny surface scratches right at where the bevel meets the edge of both razors. After stropping using the very routine listed below, these very tiny surface scratches were gone from what I could see and the edge had a really nice and even mirror polish to it all the way across and both edges had a more pronounced haze to them compared to before stropping. So I decided to stick with this routine from here on out:

#1: Before Shave: 15 round trips smooth leather only:

#2: After the shave: 5 round trips scrub leather only:

Sometimes it helps to keep things simple. And a lot of what I see out there kindly complicates matters. In my humble opinion, a lot of the stropping routines that you see out there in social media and on various websites and YouTube videos is really overkill and is NOT necessary. Plus those routines often increase your chances of making a mistake during stropping and ruining the edge on your straight razors. Of course that's just my humble opinion. The edges on both of my straight razors will NOT be any where near as good as they were when they arrived here a little over a week ago. But that will change later on. My conversation also led me to delete 2 previous blog posts because I was incorrect about some information and it would take too long to edit.