Stropping- Honing -Buffing

Stropping does round an edge, and people who quit over it are not wrong. They have simply stopped halfway. Work only the outside on soft leather and the bevel curls over, which makes the tool push instead of slice. Do both faces, outside then inside, and the rounding cancels itself. That one change is why I strop every day and why I stopped worrying about it.

Have you been told stropping ruins your edge? Did somebody you trust say it, so you quit? A man in my chat named Sergio said exactly that, minutes before I went live, and I understood him completely. I went through that stage myself. Then I came back, and now I strop daily.

My grandfather shaved with a straight razor. Every morning he pulled it across a piece of hide before he touched his face. I had no idea what he was doing. I only knew that the razor was the most frightening thing in his toolbox, because it was so sharp that I was afraid to pick it up, and he was afraid I would.

He taught me, and somebody taught him, and somebody taught that man. Stropping is not a modern shortcut. It is old.

What changes once you strop both sides

• Rounding is real. A soft surface plus a hand that rocks a little equals a curved bevel, and nobody holds a tool perfectly still.
• A curved bevel makes resistance when you push into the fibres, even when the edge is genuinely sharp.
• Working the inside as well as the outside puts an opposite curve against the first one, and the resistance mostly goes away.
• Hand sharpening on a stone rounds too. Buy any old second hand tool and look at it.
• Leather, wood, MDF and felt all work. Each rounds a different amount.

What is the difference between honing, stropping and buffing?

Three words for one family of jobs, and the borders between them are genuinely soft. Honing and stropping are near enough the same thing to me. Buffing is what happens when the surface gets really soft, like felt, and the edge is being polished rather than shaped.

All three live in stage three. Stage one is grinding a new tool into the shape you want. Stage two is making the edge actually sharp. Stage three is today, and the question people keep asking is whether stage three is worth doing at all.

By the way, look at what a new tool arrives with. This one is a BeaverCraft from Ukraine and the steel genuinely surprised me for the money. Beside it sits an Auriou, French, and the price gap is not something you can even discuss in the same sentence. Both came with the same problem. The bevel is short and steep, so to reach the wood I have to lift the handle four inches off the surface, then five, and I am still not touching anything. No bueno.

Does stropping really round the edge?

Sergio is right about the rounding, and this is the drawing I made for him. Take a chisel. Lay it on soft leather and push. Your hand fluctuates, however steady you think you are, so the tool rocks a fraction and the abrasive eats slightly more metal just behind the edge than at it. Do that daily for a year and the bevel bellies over.

Now the part nobody mentions. Flip the tool and work the hollow face as well. You have put a second curve on, facing the other way, and what is left behind is much closer to straight. Some resistance remains. Not much.

And be honest about the alternative. Sharpen a gouge freehand on a stone, the way everybody teaches, and your hand rocks there too. Go to any flea market, pick up the old tools, and look at those bevels. Every one of them is rounded. Nobody did that deliberately. Freehand work is simply limited, which is what jigs exist to solve, and jigs take time I do not have.

What do you strop on if you have no leather?

Wood. A block of the same basswood you carve, and it costs nothing. That thought is not academic either. Somebody in India is not going to buy cow hide, because the animal is holy there. Somebody else simply cannot afford it.

Rub compound along the block and strop the outside, exactly as you would on leather. It goes black, which is the only proof you need that metal is leaving the tool. Then the good part. Take the gouge and carve its own shape into the block. Now you have a hollow that fits that tool and nothing else, and you can strop the inside of it.

One block will hold a hundred profiles. Micro tools, big tools, enormous tools. Flexcut sell shaped stropping blocks and the idea behind them is identical. A piece of wood is your friend.

What you use	How it behaves against the rounding problem	Inside too	What it costs you to try
A leather strip	Soft, so it rounds more than others	Yes, folded	A belt you already own works
A basswood block	Carve the profile of your own tool	Yes, carved	One offcut and about ten minutes
Ten millimetre MDF	Hard and flat, so it barely rounds	Outside only	Cheaper than any decent sharpening stone
A felt wheel	Softest of all, and much the fastest	Yes, easily	Needs a motor turning under it

Furniture makers often reach for MDF instead, and they have a point. Mine is ten millimetres, three eighths of an inch, and being hard and flat it barely rounds anything, because there is no give to push into. Use it like a stone for the outside, then a folded scrap of leather for the inside. A man in my chat called Stefan strops his adzes on MDF, which is exactly right for the big stuff.

Leather has two faces and they behave differently. The rough side takes compound far better, so it charges quickly, and it is also the softer one, which means it rounds more. Shiny side, less grip and less rounding. Pick whichever suits the tool.

Notice that I never glue my leather to a board. Glued flat it can only reach the outside, and a gouge has a sweep, so half the job is out of reach. Loose leather folds around any curve you own.

Which compound should you buy?

Honestly, it barely matters, because every one of them abrades. Dark green is the most aggressive, light green is gentler, blue is very fine indeed, and that ranking holds across most brands.

Mine are Koch. Green for the work, blue for the finish, and the blue is a diamond compound. Neither is cheap and both last a very long time. The BeaverCraft compound has quietly become a favourite too, around ten dollars with a piece of leather, and it hones beautifully. Woodcraft carries plenty of alternatives.

What makes me stay with Koch is mess. By hand it hardly matters. On a machine it matters a great deal, and this one does not fling itself across my bench. The blue is hard as a rock, so hard you can barely charge leather with it unless you use the back face. On a machine it also seems to keep the steel cool, which the makers claim and I cannot prove.

Can you sharpen a tool with nothing but a strop?

You can, and I proved it on camera. I took a set of Schaaf tools out of the box, imagined I was not a professional and owned no expensive stones, and carved a design of grapes using stropping alone. Those sets run about ninety five dollars. A single decent water stone can cost two hundred for one grit.

That experiment is the honest answer to somebody starting out with very little money. Buy the tools. Buy a bit of hide. Strop them. You will carve.

Which machine, if you want one?

Four sit on my bench and each earns its place differently. The Koch from Germany runs about five hundred dollars, solid metal, quiet, stable, safe, with four wheels. Yellow and green are soft pressed paper, blue and red are hard, and harder means less rounding. Its wheel is short, so it touches only a small arc of the bevel instead of scooping a hollow the way a wet stone does.

That Koch has limits worth naming before anybody spends five hundred dollars on my word. Its wheels will not take a V-tool at all, and reaching inside a micro tool with them is simply impossible. Every machine in this room fails at something, which is why four of them are here and why folded leather still lives on the bench beside a stone.

My favourite is the cheapest. A Work Sharp, about two hundred dollars. Changing a wheel takes under a minute and they sell a glass wheel with leather bonded to the other face. Charge the leather with green and rock the tool exactly as you would by hand.

One limitation there. You cannot reach an inside bevel with that leather, because you will hit the glass. So I lay a soft felt wheel on top of the glass one and charge it with blue. Barely any pressure. It turns black anyway, and you can put a bare hand on it, write on it, polish your nails on it.

The Tormek honing attachment is leather as well, one face for outside and one for inside, and it runs very slowly. Slow means accurate and it means you will never burn a tool. Only green goes onto it, because the blue is far too hard to load.

Then there is the one nobody expects. A plain bench grinder I bought twenty five years ago for forty dollars. I turned it round so the switch faces away, which makes the wheels spin away from me instead of toward me, and I fitted two leather wheels, one about ten millimetres thick and one about twenty. It runs roughly a horsepower and it is brutally fast, so I keep only green on it and never leave a tool sitting.

If you are nervous about soft felt, there is a fourth road. Buy a wheel with honing paper on it, 3,600 and 6,000 grit, and put no compound on it whatever. Every single time I teach in person somebody reaches for my compound and tries to rub it onto the paper. Please do not. It is sandpaper. It lasts a very long time and it gives you a razor edge, especially with a bar jig holding the angle steady.

Knives go on the same machine. My favourite is a number 12 by Pfeil, charged with blue, one side and then the other. You cannot work right up to the handle, though you never carve there anyway.

How sharp is sharp enough?

Sharp enough means the wood stops arguing with you. After honing I can hold a gouge with two fingers, no second hand behind it, and it starts carving basswood on its own weight. The wood settles it, not me.

And an edge like that lets you break a rule. With a tool polished that far I can work against the grain and still get a shining surface, which you simply cannot do with a tool that is merely sharp. It ends up keener than the instruments a surgeon works with. I mean that literally.

When I teach at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking in Indiana, students turn up having bolted a Tormek inner attachment onto the top of a Work Sharp with one screw, so they get inside and outside bevels on one small machine. Good ideas travel. Mine is not the only way, and I would genuinely like to know what you use.

The rest of this sits across the sharpening course, shape by shape. A straight gouge is where to start. The V-tool is where most people give up, and one more lesson waits for when it still misbehaves. Bent shapes get their own: the spoon gouge, the back bent, the skew bent. Bigger steel goes to the large gouge and finer work to micro tools, with diamond discs and my own bent L-bracket after that.

Here is the truth about all of it. I carve for a living, so time is money and every minute at a wheel is a minute off the panel. That is why I moved to machines. But I started on my grandfather's worn old hide, and if that is all you have, it is enough to carve with. You have to be real about what you can afford, and then get on with it. Come and learn the whole thing properly.

Shall we carve?