THESE BOOTS WERE MADE FOR ROLLING Before I glance at my mile-long weekend jobs list and inevitably see something that makes me realise "oh no, I really need to drop everything and do that", I'll jot down some notes on one of my simple, seemingly successful, but quite long-running DIY attempts. In 2024-01-02Fitting_Tyres_on_my_Carport.txt I babbled on about reusing old tyres to make weatherproof shade flaps hanging off the roof of my carport, which besides the minor inconvenience of causing my carport to collapse has otherwise worked out pretty well since I rebuilt it. Then recently I talked in the ideas section (2026-07-04Tyre_Road.txt) about using earth-filled tyres for building roads and car ramps, the latter being somewhere so far down my weekend to-do list that I haven't actually bothered writing it on physical copies yet, but definitely intended. Now after some months of very intermittent work I've finished yet another rubberised reinvention, preempted in fact by a recent post by Ben Collver in his log: I remember reading a piece about how in the 1960's, before the radial tires became common, people in South America figured out how to cut old tires into soles for sandals that were virtually indestructible. I have been interested in home-made footwear too. gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-08-19-gopher-is-a-sacred-space-with-community-spirit/ In my case the aim isn't to make my own footwear entirely, but repairing pars of boots where the soles have worn out. This has been the failure mode of most of my footwear, and I've got three pairs of boots that had been reduced to a worn-down or cracked-up mess underneath, including the pair I've been wearing. New pairs of good quality work boots are expensive, probably mainly for the leatherwork which is still quite servicable on the old ones. The rubber sole that's just glued on at the end of their manufacture is the problem, and here I have extremely hard-wearing rubber available to me completely for free from tyre places and in fact beside my house still on the now-broken aftermarket rims that were on my first Jag when I bought it. To be honest, although like Ben Collver's 1960s South Americans I've got a few old crossply tyres around too, I hadn't considered those, in part because tyres for vehicles that old are usually narrow and less flat, so harder to cut a suitable sole shape out of. I probably should have at least kept the ones that came off my to-be camper-trailer's wheels when I recently got those replaced, but it was hard enough to fit the two wheels in the boot of the Jag on their own. Anyway, you _can_ use radial tyres too. They're made by wrapping different layers of material on, so you just need to cut away the layers above the steel wires that prevent cutting them up like crossplys, and you'll still get strong material about 4mm thick even on tyres worn completely bald. On the ones I did, above the steel wires there seems to be a crossply-like layer with woven threads and then the top tread layer. This is then fairly easy to cut by hand with any decent knife, a pocket knife in my case, ideally over the side of a solid surface like a workbench. I have seen on TV that in some poorer countries where the sandals Ben Collver mentioned are still in fashion, they've made machines to peel the tyre tread layer off radial tyres by turning them against a blade. But it didn't show the machine in detail and seemed pretty complex to build, it would need to grip the tyre very firmly and must have some sort of gearing to turn it with all the force required. A bit much to build for a more or less one-off repair job. Searching the web I found a more DIY suggestion on old forum threads, to use a scalpel to cut the tread away by hand. Things you read on DIY web forums usually turn out to be more difficult than they sound, and that sounded pretty hard in the first place. I thought once you'd sliced through with a scalpel it might be easier to use a reciprocating saw in the slit to cut the rest of the way around. No such luck, the saw just wobbles the tyre away without cutting anything. So I set to with the scalpel. Getting started is the hardest bit. You need to pull the tread away with as much force as possible while cutting along the slit with the scalpel. To begin with some small vice-grips were great for this, and when I got enough of a strip coming off I was able (since this tyre was still fitted on a wheel) to wedge it against the floor of the verandah on my house and sit on the strip of rubber tread to pull it down and away from the slit where I was cutting. Then I could scoot myself up against it, ignoring my resultingly crushed genitals, to get the maximum force pulling away from the tyre body, which helped a great deal. In fact then with a really strong pull I could peel a little bit off without using the blade at all, but only for a moment since it was much more force than I could pull for any length of time, so I kept on wearing away at it with the scalpel, for an hour or so every few days, for some weeks. Annoyingly you do pay for this in scalpel blades, firstly by snapping them (which can be a little hazardous), and then as I got the hang of it better I discovered they go blunt fairly quickly too. I have a pack of them, but it's an unexpected cost. Squeezing water into the slit from a wet cloth might help to ease the cutting a little. By the way, I recommend goves. There's an odd effect that when you rub your finger against the rubber a lot in the same spot while cutting with the scalpel you don't really feel it eventually rubbing away the skin, and only afterwards when the numbness wears off do you find you've got a very sensitive wound on your finger. Nitrile rubber 'surgical' gloves seem to slip over the tyre surface well enough to prevent this. I think a better approach might be to build a heavy steel clamp that can clamp onto the first bit of tyre you peel off with the scalpel, then fit the tyre on a wheel or over a shaped piece of solid wood with a hole in the middle, then put it over a steel post concreted in the ground, and chain the clamp to a winch or vehicle with a low-range gearbox. I think then you could just pull the rest of the tread off the body of the tyre by sheer force, like I can do by hand with a momentary impulse of sufficient force from the right position. Anyway, after probably a couple of months doing it the hard way I had the tread fully peeled off the tyre, and as I mentioned before, after getting the tread off it's refreshingly easy to cut to shape by hand. The tyre carcus that's left, with the steel wires (mixed with rubber) exposed is also now surprisingly flexible, able to be pushed in with a slight touch. In fact this raises an answer to a problem my father had with an attempt at tyre re-use that he made. He tried to build a water pump that squeezed a tyre like a bellows to suck water in and push it out through one-way valves. It didn't work because the tyres wouldn't compress in an even way - they were too rigid. But with the tread layer removed they seem to lose this rigidity entirely, while still sealed by the inner rubber layers and strengthened by the steel wires. Possibly worth a revisit, but I think my father lost interest in the apparantly-failed idea much too long ago. Back to my boots, the next question was which glue to use. They use glues in the factory but which ones? In fact shoe repair glues are widely sold, including "Shoe Goo" which is about the cheapest, but still only sold in 110ml tubes. I tried an old 180ml tube of "contact cement" ("KS Bond") that I picked up at a garage sale years ago and it seemed to work very well, but wasn't quite enough to finish both of my first pair of boots. They also sell "contact adhesive" in 500ml and larger tins, but advertised just for bonding things to solid surfaces like timber. I wondered if it was the same stuff. After far too long on the internet trying to see past the marketing, I've concluded that "Shoe Goo", "KS Bond", and the contact adhesive sold in tins, is all a form of "polychoroprene cement", AKA "neoprene cement" or in fact just neoprene rubber since in fact it seems these are just rubber mixed with a solvent that turns it liquid and sticky, then evaporates to leave a flexible layer of neoprene joining the surfaces. This flexibility is therefore common even for the tinned adhesives advertised for use on solid surfaces, with the shoe repair varients maybe just a clear-coloured version of the same stuff. Indeed I found a datasheet for one general-purpose contact adhesive (SkiaBond 101) that listed applications including manufacturing footwear along with all the ones mentioned by the other brands. The tinned stuff is still a bit pricy at about $30 for 500ml in hardware stores, but a lot better than others - even KS Bond is now sold in smaller 150ml tubes for around $20. The process is roughly as follows: * Cut off the broken parts of the old soles on the boots with a wood saw (on one old pair of boots the rubber had actually gone crumbly and pulled away from the leather by hand entirely), leaving a flat surface to stick the new sole onto. * Trace around the boots on the strip of tyre tread peeled off as described above. * Cut out the new sole from the tyre tread around the traced lines, by holding the rubber to cut away over the edge of a workbench and cutting with a sawing motion using a strong knife. * Prepare the surface of the new and old boot soles for gluing by washing away any dirt with water and rubbing over them with an acetone-soaked rag. * In a well ventillated area, use an old paintbrush to brush on the contact adhesive to the surfaces of both old and new boot soles to be joined, and leave them separated until the glue no longer feels tacky to the touch. * Try and clean off the paintbrush in some acetone (you'll still get clumps of rubber left on it). * When the glue is no longer tacky, check the alignment is perfect before pressing the new sole onto the boot, where it will stick in position instantly. * Use wood clamps to press the new sole firmly onto the boot, which will squash the leather down a lot but it should survive. The tyre tread will want to curl back to its original round shape, so you have to watch that it stays pressed against the boot all around. * Leave it for a day to fully harden. * Trim away any overhanging areas of rubber with a knife so they won't catch in things and pull the sole away from the boot. Then go for a walk in them! Now unless you were able to preserve some heel shape from the original boot sole, you may need to add some layers to raise the heel if you find the boots uncomfortable without that, as I did: * By standing on some pieces of the tyre tread, I found two layers of ~7mm thick tread from the tyre I used (which was close to worn out) suited me for a heel height. If you use a tyre with more tread left, one layer might be enough. * Cut to shape, clean, glue and clamp as before. I glued the two pieces together first, then joined them to the boot as a whole. With the second boot I thought I'd glue them on as square pieces and cut to the exact shape afterwards, but it's a bit hard to cut two layer at once so I'm regretting it. Time will tell how long the glue lasts, but it looks good for now, and is hopefully pretty similar to what they used when the boots were made anyway. It took a long time but I'm happy with this first result, and have enough rubber left from that tyre to do one more pair of boots. I'll probably try to find an easier way of peeling the next tyre to do more after that. Of course the approach should apply equally to sneekers and other footwear, but I mainly wear boots, or gumboots around here this time of year when puddles and mud are everywhere. I'll probably wear out the cheap sneekers I bought for my evening runs (for which I try, and usually fail, to dodge the mud and puddles) soon enough too. I've taken a lot of photos of this for my own reference and might upload some later. But as usual writing this has taken up too much of my Sunday already now (so much for the morning jobs). - The Free Thinker.