Yep ... I hand strop on wood ... usually I just grab a flat piece of hardwood, plywood or MDF ... and charge it with chromium dioxide (.5 micron) or boron carbide (1.8 micron). Both are pastes. I have a hunch the chromium oxide paste is just chromium oxide you can get in stick form that's been turned into a powder and mixed with oil. I haven't found an advantage to either. I'd say either paste is a little finer than my 12000 water stone ... not by much but enough to remove the tiny scratches left by the 12000. Hand stropping on a flat surface is fine for the back sides and removing the wire edge ... but as fine a grit as the paste is ... it's real easy to round the bevel and mess up the edge if you're not careful ... however that's not much of a problem with the lathe set-up.

For a quick touch-up I use an MDF disk charged with either paste and mounted to my lathe. This way touch-ups are really quick and I've never overheated an edge. No big deal to get an edge that will easily cut hair on your arm with this method.

If you're hot on edge tools I'd like to recommend a tool lots of folk pass by that's very useful in boat making ... a very fine toothed wood rasp with hand cut teeth. I have an 8" (Bludan made in Austria) that's turned jobs that would be hard with edge tools into easy ones. It's super for paddle making and does a darn good job at all kinds of stuff ... and leaves a surface that takes little extra to smooth. Other brands are Gramercy, Auriou (if word that they're back in business is true) and luthiers rasps. Nicholson also has a random machine cut rasp that has a bit coarser cut than the others ... but still good stuff.

Ken Blanton

: Excellent Ken, thanks for the feedback. So you strop using Chromium
: Dioxide on wood? Is that finer than the 12000 grit stone? That
: was one thing I was curious about. I saw one video where the guy
: stropped it on the stone, which I thought odd, but I have never
: used that fine of a stone before so I wasn't sure.