Description
The Dovo 32450112 calf hide leather strop (formerly model no. 152-40001) is their basic offering made of extremely high quality, gently-vegetable-tanned calf leather. It’s a sensible choice for the minimalist that just wants top quality without ‘excessive’ size, or as a second strop dedicated for a sharpening paste. It also makes a great pairing with a wheel-shaped wooden block backing to produce and maintain a concave bevel form on your straight razor, the basic notion of which you can see here (using the less-curved axis of that wooden block as the backing shape).
The process for producing these Solingen calf hide strops hasn’t meaningfully changed in well over one hundred years, and really can’t be improved by any modern means. The hides are put through a progression of soaking in a tannic solution, starting more aggressively and finishing very mild, and it results in their signature supple nature.
The Dovo 32450112 has a D-ring type bottom handle and a nickel-plated swiveling ring for hanging, with boot type stitching for the endcaps. The meaningful stropping surface on this strop is about 1.75 x 13″ [4.5 x 58 cm].
All split-side type (suede style) strop leathers wear more easily than top/full grain strops. That isn’t to say cost per stropping session at home’s high, as it certainly isn’t…you should wholly expect several years of daily use before this leather may show a “tread wear indicators”, as technically with any split-side strop you’re planing off just a tiny bit of the leather with each pass of your blade. I do a whole lot more stropping here in the shop (where a hyper-accelerated climate displays the durability difference in a delicacy like the Dovos versus more utilitarian leathers) than almost any home user and still prefer the split-side strops for their feedback. They’re pleasant to use, and it is your money. You won’t dislike using them, and really only horse shells or horsebutt strops are superior, and those are extremely hard to come by in our modern time of riding around on anti-horses.
