Goodbye Pastes & Sprays:

Earlier today I spoke to a friend of mind who's re-honing my razors which I'm told that they're on their way back to me and since he has been honing much longer than I have, I thought I'd ask him how my edges looked since I've been maintaining them for several months now. He said they look ok but to ease up a bit on the chrox pastes and he ONLY recommends doing a touch up once every 20 days. And after thinking about it, I have decided to eliminate the pastes and sprays from my stropping routine. Here's why. I have a Norton 4/8K combo stone that I got extremely comfortable shaves with just using it along with smooth leather only before and after each shave. When ever I used the pastes or sprays my shaves were good, but they could've been much better than they were:

I'm also looking at getting a new strop. The one I've been looking at is available at West Coast Shaving supplies for around $50 U.S. Dollars. It's a Russian leather strop and they also have an oil tanned version of it which I think would be really nice. So as of now, I won't be using any more pastes or sprays. I was told that I didn't need to.