Description
A simple strop made of soft calf hide that’s 2mm thick, the Thiers-Issard hanging strop uses calf hides which come from an area of France known as Forez, where calves have been farmed for various hide-based pursuits for generations.
The “loop-over” is unnecessarily large; as constructed, the stop’s about ~21″ long, but the actual stropping zone you have clean between the four rivets is 2.5″ x 14.5″. Why the heck did they loop it so high, are you supposed to put your whole fist in there or something? Well, you can’t question French goods, that’s a part of it; actually you can question them, but you’re not going to get anywhere, rather like changing the behavior of house cats…those that want to change their cats to accommodate them shouldn’t have cats in the first place, because the whole point of the stupid demanding little animals is to “renounce yourself to cat”, to throw yourselves at the mercy of a demanding and peculiarly specific little creature(s) -you change to accommodate the cat, not the other way around, or you do not engage with the thing as its creator desired in the engineering room. So, think of the eccentricities and dislikes of any Thiers-Issard (or really any French goods) as features, because the French themselves sure do, and damned if I’m not drinking their fine cool thirst aid!
The quality is there, though, and that’s always the hard thing to source-the quality of the hide, its pliancy, and its flatness across the strop are top notch.
This strop’s hide has a relatively high coefficient of friction, it is not like a glassy horse shell strop as an example.
Buy our dedicated lapping plate, shape a block of wood via that plate to put behind your strop as a wheel reference, and strop on that shape for the very best results… I do it every day!
Handmade in France.
