Some people use a leather strop for deburring. That is perfectly possible if you know what you're doing, accept some rounding of the edge and do it only with softer steel types. In that case the rough side is being used. The idea is the burr gets weakened, and eventually will fall off. Haven't seen this working only with very simple soft carbon steels where it makes little sense because deburring on stones with those steels is already very easy.
Things get more problematic with harder and more charged alloys, where the burr has to get abraded along the entire stone progression. On a stone, one uses edge leading strokes to avoid the formation of a new burr while abrading the old one. On leather, the burr doesn't fall off, and if it were to happen it would leave a severely damaged edge behind.
With softer stainless like the one Henckels, Wüsthof and Victorinox the problem is in the high polishing that results from the stropping. Edge retention will suffer. Best keep those steels beneath a 1k grit. The chromium carbides tend to break out from their soft environment (called 'matrix'). The carbides aren't abraded during the stropping, but the matrix gets even more weakened.
I'm well there are tons of videos showing how simple stropping is. It is not. Better learn good stone sharpening, raising a burr, recognise it, chase it, abrade it, before starting with a very different technique and new tools. It's the man, not the arrow.
Things get more problematic with harder and more charged alloys, where the burr has to get abraded along the entire stone progression. On a stone, one uses edge leading strokes to avoid the formation of a new burr while abrading the old one. On leather, the burr doesn't fall off, and if it were to happen it would leave a severely damaged edge behind.
With softer stainless like the one Henckels, Wüsthof and Victorinox the problem is in the high polishing that results from the stropping. Edge retention will suffer. Best keep those steels beneath a 1k grit. The chromium carbides tend to break out from their soft environment (called 'matrix'). The carbides aren't abraded during the stropping, but the matrix gets even more weakened.
I'm well there are tons of videos showing how simple stropping is. It is not. Better learn good stone sharpening, raising a burr, recognise it, chase it, abrade it, before starting with a very different technique and new tools. It's the man, not the arrow.
