should I be conditioning my strop? what kind of leather did you use? I have one that’s just veg tan and another that I think is combination tanned.
I have only ever used simple veg-tan, undyed tooling leather for strops with compound. Others use belt blanks. Other than it being porous enough to hold compound, I don’t think it really matters that much.
I never condition my leather strops with anything. I just rub chromium oxide buffing compound on like a big crayon, and rub again when it gets black with swarf. When the compound cakes up to the point that it no longer makes a smooth surface, I scrape it off with a razor blade, down to where I can see leather fibers again, and start over crayoning on compound again.
I personally like using the flesh side of the leather better. I tried using the grain side for a year or so, but I found compound would flake off, and scraping off compound would inevitably nick up and roughen the surface in the end.
I think leather and side matter more when stropping in the old sense of just rubbing straight on leather, without any abrasive. People seem to use waxed leathers more often for that. And often loose pieces of leather, not mounted to a paddle or block. But for knives doing cutting, rather than razor blades only doing shaving, I’ve had much better results using buffing compounds.
I have the Flexcut kit in this video, except I couldn’t get that much compound to stick to it. Although as you can see, there’s still not a lot on there, but it seems to work for him - wasn’t really doing anything for me. I had seen someone elsewhere suggest a little conditioner, so I put a little drop of Lexol at one end and spread it around with a Q tip, let it sink in and dry etc. Didn’t seem to make the existing compound on there any better, but I had also picked up the green compound from Lisa’s shop and misplaced the yellow compound. Compared to the yellow, the green stuff colored on more readily and very evenly. Compared to the unconditioned part, more compound seemed to stick on the conditioned part. I did maybe 10 strokes on each side over that (both parts, wasn’t really trying to differentiate performance with condtioned part vs not) and then everything was real sharp! So idk what I was doing wrong the first time.
In my experience, it’s totally unnecessary to cover leather strops entirely with buffing compound. Here’s a direct link to the section of my recent sharpening guide that describes it: https://oneandawl.org/t/kemitchells-sharpening-for-new-shoemakers/166#p-698-preparation-12
With repeated coatings and recoatings, my strop surface does become more thoroughly green, though also streaked with black swarf. That might look more pleasingly uniform, but I see it more as a bad sign that I’m near the point where the wax compound has caked up enough that I’ll need to scrape it off and start again.
As long as when you drag your knife along the strop, the edge is rubbing over compound, it does the job.