I made this pair a bit over a year ago, and in that time I have worn them for around 5,100 hours, around the house, in the garden, feeding the animals, walking (and sometimes running if I’m late) down the street, moving furniture, welding (though just the once; I thought better of it after that
) etc. To put that into a days context, that’s 14 hours per day, 7 days a week for the last 365 days. If they were used as dress shoes for two evenings a week, at 7 hours each night, that’s 7 years worth of wear. There is a lot of dirt and rocks in our area and, though I have tried to be aware of where my feet were, there have been the odd miss-haps with them with people stepping on the toes, and I put a steel filing cabinet down too close to myself…
We were due to exhibit at a ‘Lost Trades Fair’ and I wanted to be able to show them ‘as worn’ and ‘re-furbished’. I use Saphir Dark Brown polish on them, and so to remove it I used paper towelling, dampened with Pure Turps (pine turpentine), trying not to make the leather too wet with it.
I use leather to make our toe puffs (boxes) and heel stiffeners. This, combined with the Herschkleber Paste I use to bond and stiffen them, means that it is possible to soak them down and re-shape them. The vamp on this pair isn’t lined (Summer shoes) but the quarters are. In order to originally keep the toe puff in place, I used a thin bead of latex glue along it’s skived leading edge (going across near the root of my toes) sticking it to the inside of the vamp. This isn’t water soluble once dry, and bonds well. The rest was liberally coated in the paste. As the quarters are lined I just pasted inside the quarters and lining, and both sides of the counter (stiffener) and slipped it in place prior to lasting. If heat, or solvent activated, synthetic stiffeners had been used, I don’t think much could be done to re-shape them.
These photos show the bulk of the polish removed and the darkish line going across the tip of the toe is where the filing cabinet caught them.
