I decided to get some real stropping compound, and after reading here for a bit, went with Hand American. After convexing the edge on the beltsander, I skipped the power stropping and went with hand stropping. For the strop, I just carved off a piece of leather from my sheath making supplies and loaded it up (I used both the liquid and the powder on the strop, using the directions on their site - except I used gloves). I think I got a better result when using the hand hone as opposed to the leather belt on the sander (maybe just my crap technique on the sander, but I'm going to do what works for me!)

You can see in the first pic the sheen that the strop develops when you really work the compound in



A close up of the edge...



Unfortunately, the blood the knife was thirsting for was my own...



Oops! The wound is actually kinda deep - I didn't hit bone, but it took a fair amount of pressure to stop the bleeding, and I have a little bit of numbness on that side of the fingertip. Luckily the knife was sharp enough that no tearing occured, and I was able to squish the edges of the wound back together <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" /> So remember boys, knives are always loaded!