A Pasted Strop Alternative:

One of the things that people often ask about is pasted strops and people often ask about the different pastes and sprays also. Well here's an alternative you can use if you don't have any pastes or sprays and if you don't feel like the razor needs to be re-honed from start to finish and that would be stropping on a stone. I wanted to remove the harshness that the synthetic water stones had so I used my Soft Arkansas oil stone using the weight of the blade only :

What you simply do is 25 stropping strokes on your favorite finishing stone. Both my Gold Monkey Triple 6 and Gold Dollar 208 were in really good shape, but they were starting to tug a little bit (especially the Gold Monkey) and needed a touch up and I really don't like the synthetic edges anymore. The 66 with an Arkansas oil stone kindly spoiled me a little bit:

After I did that, I went to my hanging strop and I did a different routine for each razor. For the Gold Dollar 208, I did the usual routine which was 10 on the linen, 25 on the scrub leather, and 50 on the smooth leather. And for the Gold Monkey I did 15 on the linen, 30 on the scrub leather, and 60 on the smooth leather :

This left a really nice and polished looking edge under my loupe and I'm really looking forward to shaving with these razors to see how well this worked. Best Sharpening Stones has the grit listed for the compounds as follows. Black = 3,000 grit, Green = 6,000 grit, and White = 12,000 grit. Here's the link for that specific web page: http://www.bestsharpeningstones.com/catalog/Stropping-Compounds.htm . So for those who want to touch up their razors and don't have any pastes and/or sprays, this is a reliable alternative that should help.