Back when straight razors were still the predominant method for carrying out the daily shave, a wide variety of accessories and nicknacks were invented to go along with them.

Just like how nowadays you have suction-cup stands for your smartphones, or bendy-bendy-all-adjustable tripods and selfie-sticks for all your photographic social-media needs, or how companies are now trying to sell you all kinds of groomers, trimmers and motorised hedgeclippers to trim literally every part of your body that you can reach (and even some which you probably can’t!), back at the turn of the 20th century, all kinds of manufacturers were cranking out an equally wide variety of gizmos that claimed to make your grooming routine oh-so-much-easier!

From specialist sharpening stones to razor-kits, reusable blades and shaving sticks, all kinds of accessories were available from any number of magazines, catalogs and specialist suppliers. One of the most common accessories – especially popular among the well-groomed traveling gentlemen of the world – was the retractable razor strop.

Strops – the long, wide strips of leather used to smooth off and realign the edges of the blades on cutthroat razors – had to be as smooth and as flat as possible. Folding, bending or creasing the strop in any way while traveling would cause excessive wrinkles, kinks or deformity to the leather, which would render it useless as a strop. Because strops had to be kept smooth and flat, they could take up a lot of space when traveling. However – there was nothing against rolling up a strop – simply rolling a strop up wouldn’t cause creases or fold-lines that a razor-blade could trip over – which made it the ideal way to package a strop small enough to the portable, without compromising its structural integrity.

The only thing was – there had to be a way to easily roll and unroll the strop each time it was used. In the end, a simple coiled-spring retractable mechanism was created, and housed inside a metal barrel or casing. One end of the strop was attached to the spring-barrel inside the casing, and the other end of the strop trailed out of the mouth of the casing. The remaining leather was coiled up inside the casing, and wrapped around the barrel. Pulling the strop out for use would cause the spring inside the casing to tighten up, and letting go of the strop would make the spring relax, spinning backwards and pulling the strop back inside the storage case.

Simple, and effective.

So effective that several of these retractable strops were manufactured and sold to the public! What had once been a strip of leather over a foot in length and two to three inches in width, was now little more than a rolled-up leather strap, tucked into a metal casing smaller than a soda-can! So simple, so robust, and so convenient!

The majority of these retractable razor strops were housed in cases made of nickel-silver, or silver-plated pewter, or some other variety of cheap, white metal, presumably to keep costs down. The one which I bought online differs from all these greatly, in that the outer casing is made entirely of sterling silver – and has all the hallmarks to prove it!

I have seen several of the silver-plated ones, but never one which was made of solid sterling silver before. After winning it at auction

Pulling Apart the Strop

The original leather that comprised the main component of the strop was completely un-salvageable. It was dry, cracked, torn, brittle and covered in grime. No amount of beeswax and polishing was ever going to restore it.

The first step was to remove this. To do that, I unscrewed the strop-casing, starting with the large bolt that goes right through the body of the casing. After unscrewing it, I pulled it out, and broke the casing open into its three main components: The barrel, and the two end-discs.

Inside the barrel was the strop, and the winding cylinder, all held together by two end-caps.

I pulled these out and then removed the spring that activated the recoil-mechanism. The final step was to remove the actual leather from inside the cylinder. The leather is simply held in place by friction, and three triangular claws that hold the leather in place. I ended up just cutting the leather out using my pocketknife and pulling it out with tweezers.

I used the original leather as a template, from which to cut a strip of fresh leather of the same dimensions, from some scrap leather of the same thickness and similar finish.

The next step was to fit this into the winding cylinder, and fit the three claws in place, to stop the leather sliding out. After that, the spring was put back inside, the end-caps slid on, and then the leather was simply rolled up around the cylinder.

After that, the cylinder, spring and leather were dropped into the barrel, and the end-discs were fitted back on. I fed some of the leather out of the mouth of the barrel, and then started screwing the bolt back on. This proved to be surprisingly tricky and took a few tries to get right – but the threads finally meshed and the whole thing was screwed back together.

The final step was to cut and sew a new pull-strap to put onto the end of the strop, polish up the metal to remove the worst of the tarnish, and then hang it up in my bathroom. All done!

The hallmarks on the silver casing reveal that the strop was made in Birmingham, in 1924. For something that’s nearly 100 years old, it works surprisingly well!

The spring is perhaps not as elastic as it once was, but the results speak for themselves…