The kriss Kross or any type of those de blade sharpeners caught my eye.. . At some point I need to get a strop..
I got it mostly for the Kris Kross. The strops were just a bonus. I'll dig through the blades and keep any good ones. The GEM blades are probably still good. The clippers I'll sharpen and sell here for the cost of shipping if anyone wants one. Ditto for the shave brushes, unless any are restorable without removing the knots. The strops I'll restore and use. Might cut the worst one up for Rolls replacement strops. They are all probably shell horsehide, as old as they are. Might sell one of them cheap, as a newbie starter strop. We'll see. The seller is going to roll them up for me, rather than fold them. That's always a nice bonus when the seller will work with you. Just looked at Kriss Kross prices on eBay. They want stupid money for them. There's other stroppers that work just as well, if not better, for a fraction of the price. Twinplex or Blue Beard stroppers, just to name a few. Edit: oh, and the full pack of Kroman blades at the bottom of the pile of blades that aren't visible in any of the pictures. ...I wish. Lol Edit 2: I honestly didn't expect to win it. I put in a fairly low bid at the last second, with the expectation that someone would bid higher than $30.
I always accepted the "fact" that those old stroppers didn't work on stainless blades, and my haphazard trials seemed to bear that out years ago. Recently, I've been told that people are getting good results with stainless by using stropping compound, so that's renewed my interest in these things a bit, plus all things considered, I already have a lifetime supply of carbon super blue blades. Several lifetimes, in fact, since I do use stroppers and shake sharp razors with them, which extends the life of the blades considerably further than all but the very best stainless blades can hope to match.
I see one blade bank in the picture. I have no idea what the top strop is, other than it seems to have a linen component, and I assume this was all stuff that came from a barber shop that closed down, and was likely display pieces or decorations. The strops all look like early 1900's barber strops. I just won the auction a few hours ago. Teleportation isn't a technology we have yet. Lol.
If you go that route, the leather straps on the inside will need to be cleaned with saddle soap, and be redressed with strop dressing. Be fairly gentle, the leather when wet is fragile. I wore through mine when cleaning it, but luckily in a spot where it doesn't affect the blade. I may replace the leather in it anyway. I haven't decided yet.
I've never really looked at the Kriss Kross in any sort of depth, and now I'm playing catch-up. (I did say this was more or less an impulse buy, right?) Apparently the Kriss Kross works on 'most' blades. This includes DE, GEM type, and injector blades. Plus whatever other blades will fit. This separates it from the vast majority of stroppers, most of which only work on DE blades. Very interesting... I guess that explains the high prices. I have no explanation for the prices otherwise. It's impractical for a DE blade, as it only does one side at a time, but it also automatically decreases pressure over time as it nears the end of the stropping cycle. The pressure is also manually adjusted before stropping to account for whether the blade is new or well used. There's a couple unique concepts at play here, and they draw heavily (I know, I'm punny) from vintage straight razor stropping techniques. Edit: took a closer look at the strops in the photos. The top one looks savable, as does the bottom one. Both appear to have a linen component on the back, though the bottom one might have a leather one instead. The center strop is not salvageable, but looks to have a second leather strop component, also not salvageable. It will become donor leather segments for my twinplex and strop material for Rolls Razors. All the strops are covered in black stropping compound, so who knows what they look like under all that.
A Merkur Progress that was miss marked ....... offer was accepted. Never tried one and price was right.