Thread: Boots

I am sitting here wondering how anyone can make a pair of boots last 10 years? Then it dawns on me you guys are talking about high top shoes! My dress shoes are 5 or 6 years old and I wear them 3 or 4 times a year so they still look brand new.

When I was younger and could only afford one pair of boots I found out that the cheap boots lasted me 6 months and the twice as expensive ones lasted me a year. The advantage of the cheap ones is I got new boots twice a year.

I was teasing my daughter who is now 24 last week. I use to work at a candy factory. When she was a year or so old she was playing around my feet. I didn't think anything about it until she looked up at me. She had a big black circle around her lips. She had been sucking/licking the sugar from my boots! LOL

With thinking of that I now work in a hospital and keep a set of boots just for work. who knows where they have been and what i might drag home. My boots now last me 2 years but they are only worn half time!

I don't resole boots even if I could because the uppers are worn more than justifies the price of a sole.

I got married in my ostrich Justin's boots...27 years ago..they only get out about 6-7 times a year, and still look like new !!

Originally Posted by 32t

I am sitting here wondering how anyone can make a pair of boots last 10 years? Then it dawns on me you guys are talking about high top shoes! My dress shoes are 5 or 6 years old and I wear them 3 or 4 times a year so they still look brand new.

Not sure we're all talking about that. The ones I posted are going on six years old. For most of that time I only had one pair of black business shoes and the boots. Wore em all through rainy seasons, snow, hot and dry temps in Oz. A good polish and condition and they feel and look like new.
You can't beat a good pair of Spanish boots.

Originally Posted by Frankenstein

Not sure we're all talking about that. The ones I posted are going on six years old. For most of that time I only had one pair of black business shoes and the boots. Wore em all through rainy seasons, snow, hot and dry temps in Oz. A good polish and condition and they feel and look like new.
You can't beat a good pair of Spanish boots.

I guess it depends what 32 does in his boots, site boots dont last forever but with care footware will last, assuming it isnt some hideous fashion shoe that has no substance and looks to last a season.

I've had three "real" jobs in my life. 2 years delivering fertilizer and chemicals, six years delivering and bottling Pepsi, and 21 years at a power plant. All three jobs were hell on boots, the fertilizer would eat them up. The Pepsi would eat them up. The synthetic gas turbine oil would eat them up. I learned real quick, you have work boots, and other boots. Good boots, kept well oiled, will last quite a while.

Well, to last it has to be made with quality materials and quality workmanship. For example leather is an expensive material, so the standard way companies cut costs is to split the leather into thin layers and use those. Then the glues are typically polymers and proper polymerization can have pretty tight tolerances. And if a worker has to spend say only 30 seconds applying the glue the result may be substandard and the shoe can fall appart in short time.

High end shoes involve a lot of manual work so that the variations in the natural materials or even on machine made components could be accounted for and adjustments can be made so that the shoe is free of at least functional defects. And as we all know manual labor is expensive, and high quality materials are expensive too, so you end up with much more expensive final product.
And with goodyear construction resoling is a fairly straightforward procedure, hence it's used on many shoes that are marketed to last a long time.

I'll try to take a picture of my boots - they've been through I believe 3 years now and while I don't abuse them i.e. unnecessarily wading through mud and puddles, I don't baby them either. After all they have a primary role to serve which is to protect my feet. I often wear them daily for weeks (I do use trees though), walk in snow, rain, through construction patches on my way (which in my town seems to be a permanent thing). I just keep them conditioned with neatsfoot oil and they certainly don't look like new, but they look like well maintained worn shoes.
But I do white collar stuff, so my work is almost as gentle on clothes as it gets.

(As a side tangent, around here it's quite funny to see every year during interview season tons of young kids going around with brand new suits and shoes - usually they have no idea what a dress shoe is and would wear square toe with tripple pleats or an apron toe or even bicycle toe I'm sure those who get the jobs learn though.)