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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

I am under the assumption only dress shoes or similar can be repaired. I cannot imagine it is possible to repair a pair of running shoes or sneakers.

As a side note, I would change careers if I had to wear dress shoes so much that they got to the state of needing to be repaired.

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So actually I had a pair of "unrepairable" sneakers repaired, a £150 pair of Ecco shoes where the sole completely wore out, I kept asking around if they could be possibly repaired and found a cobbler in Edinburgh that replaced the sole for £50 - it was perfect fit, they somehow gave them a brand new lease of life.

But of course the main problem here is that you could easily buy a new pair of shoes for £50.....

£50 for a new sole seems expensive. unless you were looking for some special material or like sneakers they were difficult to fix.

either way, if £50 doubles the live of a £150 pair of shoes, i think it is still worth it. you need to consider the new pair you could get for £50 may not be what you want to wear, because otherwise why did you spend £150 to begin with?

Nice dress cowboy boots make better and more comfortable dress shoes than dress shoes.

You might not like the stylistic statement, but they're actually shoes you can spend 18 hours on your feet.

You can find something comfortable in nearly any boot style, since they're almost all based on designs that were actually intended to be used for long stretches of physical activity. Work-boot styles (obviously), equestrian styles (western, Chelsea, jodhpur), military (chukkas, "jump boots"), and hunting (which even includes most "dress" styles, which are typically based on rural British hunting/stalking boots) all have practical-wear lineage, and usually are little removed from the originals, if at all.

Yep. "Roper" boots are especially good if you want something a bit less 'cowboy'. For instance: https://www.tecovas.com/products/the-earl?variant=3168641063... (I can't speak to that brand, I don't own any Tecovas).

For day to day, I got myself some of these, because they can be resoled and repaired and are tough: https://www.redwingshoes.com/work/mens/soft-toe/SuperSole-01... - they are not very stylish, but then again neither am I so we're even.

I have a bunch of pairs of Tony Llama, Justin and Nacona boots, realistically, Tecovas offers you more options if you dont want square toe boots - the industry seems to have decided everyone wants square toe boots.

I'm lucky and I'm in Fort Worth, there is a Justin Boot Outlet, which has factory seconds for.. well cheap, and I've bought far too many boots there. But I find them more comfortable than tennis shoes, other than perhaps I look a bit silly wearing them with shorts.

For someone choosing any fine leather shoe or boot, some pro tips:

* Chose Calf Leather - its easier to maintain, and care for and has a longer life than virtually any other material.

* If you dont need fancy, oil skin boots are a good option, all you need to do is clean them with a finger brush and saddle soap, then re-oil them periodically. You can oil them with either Mink Oil or Hubbards Shoe Grease.

* Learn how to polish shoes - use a color matching cream polish, then let that dry, then use a paste (like Kiwi) polish on top, buff that to a gloss. There are good youtube videos that can show you how to do this too. For that shaft of these boot, just use a leather moisturizing cream.

These are good options for the boot newbie.

https://www.tonylama.com/en-US/Product/Details?stylenumber=T...

https://www.tonylama.com/en-US/Product/Details?stylenumber=7...

I'm on the same page.

When my fancy dress shoes need repair or replacing, even I can tell what work it needs, though I can't perform that work myself. It needs a new sole, or new stitching, or wtv.

With sneakers, I'm utterly trained to think "well now it's trash" rather than "could this be repaired". And, thanks to this article, I'm gonna try to have the "how do I repair it" thought first, instead of the "how do I replace it" thought.

Which is weird, because this is absolutely already how I think about laptops and cellphones.

The pictures in the story look more like fashion-oriented mods to shoes, than straight repairs or a traditional re-soling. AFAIK you'd pretty much have to rip off the whole bottom half of a typical glue-construction tennis shoe to replace the sole, so you're practically rebuilding the thing, at that point. Look at the wide sewn-on strips around the bottom of the example shoes, just above the welt—ten-to-one that's covering up (or repairing) where the damage was done, removing the original sole.

I don't buy expensive shoes, so it seems obvious to me that it's cheaper to replace than repair, so I do that.

But I do have one expensive ($150 on sale, $300 retail) pair of winter bike boots, and the soles gradually detached from the uppers, letting water seep in. I took them to my local shoe repair place and they made them good as new for $25. Total bargain.

So, it's worth a shot.

Resoling running shoes has been around since I started paying attention to such things in the early 80s. (I'm more of a Shoo Goo guy myself.) One example:

https://nushoe.com/running-shoes-repair.html

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