I find that while stropping on newspaper can be very effective (it's almost always the last thing I do after polishing a razor on stones and before the first pre-test shave leather stropping), it's slow. I've also used newspaper, both unaltered and also rubbed with a small amount of chromium oxide powder to refresh an edge. A approximate account of the number of round trip laps I find work well for me would be:
Plain newspaper: At least 50 laps minimum, and more often up to 100.
Newspaper dry rubbed with chromium oxide powder: 20-50 laps.
I use an extremely small amount of powder that really only "kisses" the newspaper in a handful of random areas. Then, it's rubbed in very well. The "X" pattern of stropping takes care of the rest. I tape two layers of newspaper very tightly to a lapped Chinese 12K stone. With this method, I did an experiment a few months ago, purposely trying to create a wire edge on a 4/8ths "silver steel" german razor (Korte brand). 100 laps on the chrome ox newspaper each night with a shave each morning. After one week and 700 laps with the same razor, comfortable shaves and no wire edge. It simply seemed to plateau rather than yield a razor 7x sharper than when I started. I am not a big fan of chrome on hanging strops since I have definitely found edge rounding to be a real factor; not so with stropping on the flat chromed newspaper.
Chris L
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