When we discussed this before, I mentioned that I had repaired some strops using sandpaper. I also have made a bunch of bench strops out of horse butt. Now hard rolled horse butt is great for stropping because it is very dense and hard. It does not curl so much and convexes the edge a bit less than cow. The problem is that it is not very flat and has some large pores. I decided to sand those strops. After doing about a dozen of them I had a process down. It is the sam one I use for repairing my WEPS strops. I start with around 200 grit, depending on what I have handy. This is mounted on a hand sanding block.What I used last was some 200 open grit wood sanding paper. Sand until the defect that you want to remove are mostly gone. I then moved to 400 grit then 600 grit wet or dry paper. The 600 I taped to a piece of flat steel and rubbed the stop on it.
I guess you could go on to 1000 grit or higher for a finer texture, but I haven't found it to be required. The result is a smooth flat strop with a nice nap with a texture sort of like buckskin that holds pastes or sprays quite well. Once repaired the strops seem to work just as well as new ones. The fine nap that is left gives then a real nice feel at first, but soon lays down in use.

Phil

Phil,

Good to hear that sanding to 600 grit is sufficient.

Michiel did a blog post about hard rolled leather (from HA) some time ago: belgiansharpening.wordpress.com/2011/12/...d-rolled-horse-butt/ . Might be interesting.

Yes,
I read that a ways back, and a bunch of other folks raving about the hard rolled 8 lb horse butt. That is why I bought 4 whole hard rolled horse butt pieces. I cut it into 12X3" pieces myself. I noticed at one time that HA had some "select" pieces. I never got any of them because they seemed a bit expensive.
There is enough leather for a bunch of strops out of each horse butt. Only maybe two or three can be made of unblemished material (probably the quality that HA was selling). Other pieces will have fatty areas, wrinkles, scars etc. I read another article somewhere about a guy that sanded his. I ended up sanding all of my strops made from that material... so it was an easy leap to get to thinking that I could do the same with my WEPS strops when I scarred them up a bit. It worked...