How To Make A Strop from A Belt Or Scrap Leather On The Cheap

welcome back gang I'm Zell and if you watch that five video I just did on the EDC knives under 40 bucks at the end of that video we talked a little bit about maintaining the 8 CR 13 MOV us 8 and even your higher-end Steel's and the big thing you need there was a strop so I got to thinking about that and I got to looking around the house and I found some stuff you know you know I have some of these Aussie strops and I can kind of recommend them time to not they're a little thin if you're going to set them on the desk to strop with or whatever surface you're working on but very good strops and they come with compound so it's kind of a package deal you're good to go but I realize not all of us have 30 bucks to spend or not all of us want to let go of 30 bucks for a piece of leather and wood so what can we do well I found an old belt that I cut out and just to try I made a strop out of it very simple 2x4 and some gorilla glue to hold the belt down and whenever you use that gorilla glue be sure you I put another two before top of this and put about 35 pounds of weight to hold that belt down on there and put that all together and stropped up this Delica I don't know if you can see that I pretty much got a mirror edge out of it and so I was looking around a little more thinking how can we make some strops cheap I mentioned leather scraps in that video so I was looking around and I found this piece of leather it's not really supposed to be a scrap it was a piece of vegetable tanned leather I picked up to make a holster for a gun that my wife confiscated and lets me fondle occasionally so I didn't make a holster for myself but I did use this piece of leather here on the desk surface to strop with I thought well why not make an actual strop out of this so that's what we're going to do we're going to take some pieces of wood and we're going to take some paint stirs of all things this hunk of belt this hunk of scrap leather and we're going to build some straps so come on in here and let's get a look on how to do that so you want to make a strop block but you don't have a lot of money to spend first thing I did to accomplish this went to Lowe's got a three quarter by two-and-a-half 3/4 high like two and a half wide by 2 foot long originally piece of oak now I have the equipment to cut this down to cut it in half basically to about a 12 inch piece of oak if you don't have the equipment that's where Lowe's comes in or Home Depot or many of your other home improvement stores minority does this anyhow if you buy the piece of wood from them they have a saw in there and they should cut it in half for you I know that our local Lowe's and Home Depot both will do that if they won't do it doesn't take a fancy saw you know I used a miter saw but you can get away with a jig saw or a handsaw hacksaw I mean just about anything and if you get it in pine it'll be really easy to cut I got oak here that would have been a little tougher to cut with a hacksaw or something but anyhow if you get it from one of the home improvement stores they ought to be able to cut it in half for you and what we have here is a piece of vegetable tanned leather that was for another project and I ended up going a different direction with it so we're going to use this in fact you can see I've already used it some as a strop but we're going to use this as our stopping material so first thing I'm going to do is lay it up here and get the get this edge lined up with the edge of the leather and then Rob I'm going to use a very sharp full flat ground knee g10 delica to cut this leather there we go and for this strop I'm going to put Finnish side up so I have gorilla glue a white gorilla glue pen now I haven't used the white gorilla glue yet so I guess we're going to find out how it works but I read the instructions yes I really read the instructions and they are just pretty much the same as regular gorilla glue so what we're going to do is we're just going to make sure we get our corners and edges dot that stuff along and guys you don't have to use gorilla glue that just happened to be what I wanted to use because it's a good all-purpose glue that seems to work well just about anywhere and with just about any type of material you know if you wanted to use contact cement which is probably what you should use or you know whatever is whatever you've got around little stick that's not going to soak into the leather it needs to be something semi thick and kind of sticky because you do not want to use some thin glue that's going to soak into your leather and mess up the stropping surface at the basis for this and the reason that we're doing is is to make a straw buy I know you can get them online for 20 bucks sometimes little cheaper you know I've got those Aussie strops I gave about 30 for those they did come with some compound but it's not necessary this is building your own straw this piece of leather I got at the local leather shop now the piece I got was not a scrap it was a specifically cut and measured for thickness piece for a gun holster that I ended up going another way with and there we go flip it back around smooth it out now what I'm going to do is since I have the other half of this board and Gorilla Glue tells you to put pressure on it I'm going to take this off camera I'm going to set about probably about a 20 pound weight right here and let this sit for two hours and we'll come back and look at it also in that video I mentioned that we could make a strop out of a belt a used belt and I have done that and some of you may know this emblem it was an old Levi's brand belt genuine leather and I've got Green compound on one side and I put some of the Dimond emulsion on this side just to see if it would work that little full flat ground delica we just used a minute ago to cut that leather with it was strapped right there on that diamond emulsion and I think the edge came out pretty good anyhow I got to thinking and we're going to do this I hope a little bit better earlier this afternoon Susie and I stopped by our local Lowe's on our local Walmart and I asked them politely if I could have some paint stir sticks and they said sure and the stir sticks are made out of a similar wood looks kinda like a balsa but I'm not sure however the ones from Walmart are denser so those are the ones we're going to use Thank You Walmart and thank you low lows and here's how I'm going to do this so I'm going to take these I'm going to glue them together stack them up and glue them together that way we have a little bit of thickness for our strop and I'll take care of that and when it comes time to put the strop material on we'll come back and look at it all right here we are a couple hours later our strop is glued up let's see we've got some glue we've squeezed out there we're going to try to trim some of that back with our delicate and this doesn't have to be perfect guys just depends on how OCD you are and I'll probably do some more cleaning on that later but for now we just want to get the big hunks off there and you see we overlapped a little here I'll clean that up later and we overlap some here but what we got out of this was a nice flat stropping surface and the way I achieved this was after we put that glue down I have an identical piece from where I cut that piece of oak in half I put this on here and went over to the weight set and put 35 pounds right across here which squeezed all that excess glue out and allowed things to it here rather nicely and gave us a nice flat surface at this point this strop is ready to be loaded with either Rouge or daimond emulsion or just use the way it is if you don't have access to those things our Walmart paint stirrer and we got a lot of crap here we need to clean up so I'm going to go ahead and clean that up and then we'll cut our belt and glue it on there all right I cleaned up most of that and what I have here is a section of belt from that one I showed you earlier it's just a another section of that same belt and what we're going to run into is these paddles together are a little over an inch wide and the belts about 1.4 inches wide but what I'm going to do is go ahead and glue that belt down onto the paddle we will cut it for length score that there mark our link there we go and considering where I have roughed this up with belt loops I'm going to leave the back side up the backside on this leather is pretty darn smooth so I think it'll do just fine get our gorilla glue out again and same as last time just start making little dots of gorilla glue everywhere and lay our dropping material down on there and now this is going to go back under the weight I'm going to use that piece of oak that I used before to weigh this down whenever I just glued these pieces together I didn't worry about having something on top of it I just took a 15 pound weight little dumbbell and stuck over it and that gave me enough pressure to squeeze all that glue out so we're going to put this under the weight and we'll be back whenever it's done here I've taken some kme sharpeners 4 micron diamond liquid emulsion and I put on a lot more than what kme says to do but I just dotted about half of this thing because I really figure that's all I'm going to use with most of the three three and a half inch knives and now I'm just going to spread it around with my finger once I'm done spreading it around and I did get too much you could say but I'm done spreading it around I'm just going to kind of let it dry and once it's dried we'll run that delica over it a few times and see how it works out all right guys we're pretty much cured out here and I'm rather surprised it's coming out pretty good if you look at this side we've got some extra glue everywhere and I'm going to clean that up later for now it comes out pretty stable it's not perfectly flat but I've got a remedy for that this is just some of that matting like you would put in your kitchen cabinets lay it down on there and all of a sudden were nice and stable what we're going to do now is load this straw I've got some green compound and to load one of these things it's it's not complicated it's not some kind of voodoo or magic or anything I'm just going to use it like a crayon draw across the leather note right here I've got a bit of a spot in the leather not there any hand grow across it like a crayon we've got some of that stuff a little bit of pretty much everywhere now now this delicate we use this delicate for a reason the Apostle PLU that the vg-10 will roll all right all we've done with this thing today is cut that leather and tray some glue that glues pretty soft guys and trim a little bit of that oak and a little bit of this light wood I'm not sure exactly what it is so he says this stuff rolls let's see if he's right yeah I agree with him that's pretty rough compared to where it started today now I should have showed you guys that too so now that we've got the strop loaded and we're just using a belt here guys nothing fancy we're going to run this thing back and forth across it a few times any better whenever I get that cut to fit and put it on the back which I will do I'll cut that to fit the back of this little strop and I'll glue it to the back of the strap all I'm doing here guys using my thumb on this side I'll go go that way again using my thumb over here near the tip of the blade the kind of field that angle and go across the strop and then there I go over here put these two fingers on it and draw it back put those two fingers on it draw back whenever I get to the tip lift it up and you want to lift it up once you get to the tip so that you don't round your tip and I'll give it just a couple light ones they're working with eg ten you want to do really really light ones or have another piece of this paper and it's not perfect guys but that was a belt you know see if we can get some light in here on that edge all right so that strop cost us about two bucks basically it cost us whatever that bottle of glue cost and we didn't use all that much of the glue anyhow I'll get over here trim this thing up or get this one away and we'll trim it up this is the other one we built and we don't need that for this one because while we were away I glued some of that stuff onto the bottom of this one and remember I put that diamond emulsion on there we're going to do the same thing with this bird knife this is a bird crow I think remember where this one's a raven or the crow this has got CTS bd1 steel in it it's a knife that gives the tenacious a serious run for its money it has a couple of problems we'll talk about whenever I get around to reviewing it but for the most part it's better than the neisha inni now that's just a piece of vegetable tanned leather that we're using there and some 4 micron Dimond emulsion and hang on just a moment yeah here we go got some of that good old phone book paper everybody seems to like that stuff not a problem with this one get the delica back out here and see what we get not a problem this strop if you went and got a remnant piece of leather instead of the nice piece that I had bought for the holster you're probably looking at somewhere five or ten dollars worth of leather $3.00 at Lowe's and a bottle of glue and I will suggest that you get some of this shelving material to put on the bottom of them it'll keep them in place when you're using them and here I have some kme sharpeners 4 micron emulsion and some green Rouge and this is just jewelers Rouge green denotes ultra fine if I remember correctly this is what I have been using whenever I do the final straw on my knives and you've seen some of my edges they're not as pretty as Rob's but they're fairly pretty anyhow guys we're going to back on out of here we'll talk about this a little bit strops are not a big deal easy to make cheap to buy and make a huge difference in maintaining your blades all right guys we build some strops and paint him super surprised at this one this was a thought that came to me in the middle of the day while my wife and I were out running around taking care of some other stuff I thought you know those paint stirs they're free I bet we can make a stocks crop out of those with a belt and then I got my hands on them and they were pretty thin and kind of flimsy but after gluing three of them together we've got a pretty decent strop I mean is this something I want to put a $400 knife down well probably not but that's not why we're making these things we're making these things because we need something to keep a neat see r-13 in a BG 10 or you know a 154cm 420hc blades something we need to keep those things sharp and do it on the cheap and guys they don't get any cheaper than this the only place that I spent any money today whatsoever on this was the glue and this little remnant piece of that cabinet liner material and I'm just going to say that was free because we purchased that to put in the back of my wife's little SUV so that stuff wouldn't slide around back there and I just stole a little bit of extra wow this one wasn't near as surprising I knew we were going to come up with something good and we did you know this vegetable tanned cowhide you can pick this stuff up at any leather store for a reasonable cost and it doesn't have to be a nice piece that was perfectly even the same weight all the way through and perfectly tanned and colored and all that doesn't have to be that like I said earlier this is just this way because I bought her to make a gun holster with and then that gun my wife confiscated it I get to see it on occasion but it's hers now and that's okay I got a new one so we've got a few dollars and it's probably 5 or 10 bucks and 5 or 10 bucks in the remnant bin at leather shop made by you a lot of leather kind of depends on where you're shopping what the prices are around you about three dollars in this piece of oak and like I said if you go to your home improvement stores they'll probably cut it in half for you so if you don't have a saw you're good to go and I put some of that cabinet material on the back of this one as well simply because whenever you lay these things down cabinet material your strop doesn't move it's right where it's going to be and of course the $2 where the glue are that whole tube cost me two dollars and some change so really we're grad less than 15 bucks for this one - and this strop you bet I put a cévennes on this one an XM 18 Hinderer strider any of them you know so strops are not that big a deal you can buy them pre-made sure we have the Aussie strop over here we talked about it it's a very good straw but is it any better than this no it's not and a lot more expensive for what you end up with is it better than this one well yeah probably but remember we're doing this to take care of those inexpensive blades and this is going to take care of them well but some of that green compound on there if you can get some of that I believe the next step in our step back little rougher stuff is gray don't quote me on that one look it up make sure but for some of those blades if they're every day working blades I might even put a little rubber compound on it just so it'll cut a little quicker and you can get back get your edge back it may not come out all shiny like this delicate but we're talking about using it now I'm making it look pretty anyhow guys I hope you found this useful and be sure to like share and subscribe and I haven't mentioned it before about I am on Facebook Twitter Instagram all those places under Szell Szell Rick 42 ze l RI ck 42 it's in the description and the 42 is not a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy I was in the u.s. Navy and 42 is the first part of well I'll let you guys try to figure it out anyhow have a great day guys and I'll see you next time

Channel: Zelrick

Views: 41,131

Keywords: diy stropping with old belt, making a strop from a belt, old belt strop, diy strop, making a leather strop from a belt, how to make a strop from a belt, how to make a strop, belt strop, cheap strop, how to make a leather strop, diy leather strop, make a leather strop, knives, Strop, firearms, Knife Care, DIY, How To, polishing, Zelrick, cheap, kershaw shuffle 2, sharpening, knife sharpening, leather strop, edc, knife strop, outdoors

Id: mExbdASIfv0

Length: 28min 27sec (1707 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2016