Ace Marks | Restoration & Review

hey guys and welcome back so today we have a pair of ace marks double monk strap shoes that we are going to completely refurbish I know a lot of you guys reached out to us in the comment section and have asked us to do a review on ace marks we haven't been able to get our hands on a pair until a customer here in the Nashville area brought us a pair a couple of weeks ago and we are getting to those today we're going to resell those completely refurbish them and while we do that will kind of give you guys an inside look of how that the quality of that shoe and and how they're constructed and hopefully that will give you guys a little bit more insight into the ace marks brand with that being said let's go ahead and get to it [Music] all right so has usual let's go ahead and get these top lifts off you can see on these ace marks or at least on this pair they do use the combination leather rubber which is kind of a nice touch on these shoes of course I've got the little decorative nails in there as well so it's kind of a nice touch [Music] [Music] all right take this tool here and just separate the soul from the well I'll take my razor and pop those stitches that are holding on Shu all right so one of the things that I'm quite impressed with these ace marks is how the welt has stayed in place I don't know if you guys watch the last video of the Todd's loafers if you haven't then I'll put a link above where you can watch that and we kind of compare the welts now Todd's I believe is around a $600 or five $600 loafer italian-made and the welt on it the teeth at all were much much smaller than what you see on these ace marks and when I took the sole off of the Todd's the the welt was barely glued on to the shoe so the well pretty much just came off and then I had to try to follow the the line of the shoe and put it back where it was now these teeth are much more substantial they're much more along the lines of what you saw when our Beckett Semin on video and you know when I take the welt off obviously you can see it hasn't moved stayed in place it's glued on you can see there like I'm pulling on it and it's on there which is great because a lot of these blank stitch shoes when you go to pull these welts off or when you go to pull the sole off if that wealth is not glued on they tightly and it doesn't have bigger teeth on it like this one again it really makes our job much more difficult to get the well put back on exactly the way it lost so I like that on this one alright so I have the soles off of these ace marks here what I have to do now you see the nails that were holding on the heel block I'm gonna have to go in from the inside and pull these out you've got this really really thin piece of crepe that was just kind of I don't even think they were using this for padding because it is I mean is paper thin so again I don't think it was used for padding I think it was more a lot of times you'll have companies that will put things up here to prevent any type of squeaking on the shoes so if they don't put a lot of glue in here then sometimes if you've ever walked and you hear a squeak in your shoe it can be caused by you know the leather sole rubbing up against the inside so a lot of companies will put things like this or or cork or something like that to prevent that and that's what this is but since the gentleman started wearing into it we're going to go ahead and pull all of this off and instead what I'm gonna do is just put a really thin piece of cork on both of these and then I'm gonna have to pull pull out the stitches from the inside and then we'll go from there and that's when we'll start putting the sole on so let's tackle these projects [Music] all right so we've got the little screw or the remainders of the nails out now I got to pull out this old stitching alright guys so I pulled out the old nails from the bottom you saw pulled out the old stitching and I replace that old crate that was ripped and put in a new cork there so I'm going to do now is put glue on the bottoms of these shoes and glue the soles wait a few minutes let those glues cure and then we'll stick those and continue on so let's get back to it [Music] [Music] okay guys so what you have given the soles and shoes enough time for that glue to set up and cure we use a compound glue which means you know we put glue on one side glue on the other you let them cure for about 20 to 30 minutes and then when you stick them together it becomes a really really strong bond so we're good to go now we're going to get these soles stuck on [Music] all right all right let's go put these on the press [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys so what we're gonna go ahead and do now is clean up these shoes we're not going to polish them yet but you can see that this one has a big stain here and I'm not sure what got on that the customer wasn't sure what he spilt on it but I want to go ahead and try to clean these shoes they're gonna get a little wet so I want to give the shoes time to dry out and while they're drying out I can continue doing the rest of the the result so anyways let's go ahead and attack this problem and then go from there all right so we're going to use a little leather soap here and see if just the sofa loan will get that stain out [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so I can still see this dark spot left in there so the soap obviously isn't you wanted to tackle that problem alone so I'm going to try something that we've done several times and it seems to do a really good job we did a video on this stain remover for leather and what I like to do is try to clean the shoe with saddle soap it gets the shoe wet and kind of brings the moisture of that stain back up to the front then what I do is I take this product here and I spray it onto the shoe and that powder is going to begin to dry and that powder is going to suck up that moisture and try to draw it up to the top of the shoe so we're gonna let this set for several hours see if this does the job hopefully it will it like I said it'll bring that stain at the top then we'll clean it again a sigh no soap to remove all of this and I'm hoping as we've done in the past that that stain will be going so we'll come back [Music] okay so we have the solo stitched on now now what we're going to do is put these Hill blocks back on like I've done in other videos what I like to do is mark exactly where the hill block originally came and then once I've drawn that line on there then I like to take this little tool here has these little spikes on it and I just like to rough up this part of the leather and the reason that we do that and most people don't most manufacturers and those other two cobblers I don't believe do this but I like to do is just because it helps the glue to adhere to the leather better and even though we don't put a lot of glue on the Hittle blocks because it you know we don't want to make it so hard to get off the next time so anyway so sometimes you get that squeak in your shoe and you're wondering where that sounds coming from and you know sometimes that's what it is it's just you know you're rubbing on the smooth leather or maybe there's a little air pocket where the glue didn't adhere well so anyway so that's why we rough that up it's just kind of it just helps to prevent that from happening okay so we got the glue on the back of the hill we've got the glue on the back of the hill block we're gonna give this a couple minutes to set up then we'll come back and stick these still have to put the nails on here to help hold it and after that we'll put the top lifts on so we'll be back in just a second I went ahead and put the hill blocks onto these shoes you can see I went ahead and put the nails down through there so it is held on nice and tight not going anywhere one of the things that I forgot to bring up and mention you guys since we are doing kind of a refurbishment slash revue ace marks is I forgot to talk about the hill blocks on this brand what I recognized is that the hill blocks on these ACE marks is appears to be compressed particle board so with some of the other brands that we've done I believe that gets Semin on allen edmonds those are like a ground-up leather that is then compressed together and made into a hill block the ace marks look different than those brands these appear to be actually compressed particle board generally I wouldn't like that but I'll save this as long as the hill block comes off easily and it doesn't snap it doesn't break into a million pieces when they're trying to take it off then generally it's okay so for example these ace marks when I tried when I took the hill block off of these they came right off it didn't it didn't gal JIT there wasn't pieces of particle paper you know peeling off or anything like that and again as long as it comes off in nice one cleans you know block then you're good I can reuse these and if I have to repair these again don't they should pop off just as least easily the third times they did you know the second time here so anyways that appears to be what ace marks its hill blocks are compressed particle board again they held up well when I took them off and for that I'll say it's a good thing so anyways let's get the top lips put on here and keep going alright so top lifts are on the shoe there we go now what we have to do you can see that this hasn't been sanded down so we have to sand all this down and make that smoother so let's go ahead and get to that [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so we are done resoling the shoes last thing that we have to do is just put the color back into these these ace marks now the reason that the color faded so much on this one is you can see that that's where I barely see it there was a little bit of that stain mark there we were able to get most of it out so now we were just going to you know put some more conditioner and creme back on the shoe and then polish these back up and then they should be ready to go so let's get to it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so the color that we're using on these is the mahogany Saphir MDO cream the closest match that I saw to the original color if you look up underneath here at the tongue and around this area that's usually hidden by the monk strap that's the original color and it's pretty dark so these shoes had faded a lot and we're going to put the color back in there [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so I've got those wiped down so you can see how much if you don't wipe them down how much excess pigment comes off from these creams so it's really important guys that you uh you're wiping down your shoes if you're using these severe cream products all right so the last thing we're going to do is just apply a little bit of Chi wax onto the toes try to get a little bit more of that scuff that or those scuffs out and then we'll finish up okay guys so we have the shoes polished up last thing that we need to do is just put all of these inserts back into the shoe okay after I do that I will give you my final review on a smarts and show you the final product alright guys so we are finished up with the ace marks double monk straps as you can see what came in pretty beat-up we have resold put on you top lifts and polished up the uppers and they look much better so I hope the customer is pleased with the results anyways before we go I also want to give you my quick rundown and my thoughts on ace marks in general so as you can see the pair that we got in here are already worn unlike some of our other videos where we got them brand new the back of seminars were ours we got to wear them around a little bit some of the mirror moons and the Thursday boot shoes those videos were brand new so the overall shoe looked a little nicer than what these did but I like these being a little worn because it shows us how they wear my quick thoughts on it as a whole the ACE marks have very good uppers the leathers are calf skin full grain leather 's very soft very smooth I do like that about them the hill blocks were not my favorite of all of the different brands that we have reviewed so far I would say that ace marks are down toward the bottom other than johnston murphy the reason i say that most of the other brands that we have reviewed are either stacked leather or they are a leather composite so they're much easier to work with much longer lasting the ace marks is a lie compress particle board or paper it's easier to just shred into pieces it's super hard which means when we tried to go back in and put our little decorative tacks through the top left it was it was popping a bunch on they weren't even wanting to dig in to the hill block it was that hard so I'm not a big fan of their Hill blocks the welt on these I do like it's leather it stayed on there had look whiter teeth which means when we take the sole off it stays in place as opposed to some of the other shoes we have reviewed like Todd's I would say ace marks is a typical Italian made shoe and when I say that I'm not saying Italian shoes are not good what I'm saying is they're all kind of the same so you could take the ACE marks and you could put it next to a Magnani a to boot New York and some of the others cut them apart and they look exactly the same I didn't see a big difference between this shoe and a mag Nani or to boot that's up in the four hundred five hundred dollar price range for some of those the inside of them obviously don't have much cushion as with most Italian shoes it is pretty much leather on top of the the insole and it's stitched together and that's about it so it's very different than a lot of the good your well to choose that you'll see out there very streamlined very low-profile that's kind of what ace marks is and again for the three hunt for the low 300 mid 300 and even upper and even four hundred dollar price range where some of these ACE marks are falling I think there's better quality shoes out there if you're looking for overall quality you know overall better build I would say there's better shoes out there for the price point but again if that's all you're looking for is just that typical Italian made shoe very low-profile then again I think these are gonna fall right alongside Mackinaw knees and a lot of those other brands anyways I think that was about it I hope that answered a lot of your questions if you have any more questions at all regarding these leave us a comment below as we always try to answer as many of those as we can we love getting back to you guys and you know providing any inside thoughts that we can if you like this video give us a thumbs up as that always helps our videos to grow and definitely subscribe to our channel below thanks again until next time have a great day [Music] you

Channel: Trenton & Heath

Views: 216,527

Rating: 4.9043941 out of 5

Keywords: #acemarks, #acemark, #acemarksdoublemonk, #acemarksdoublemonkstrap, #acemarksreview, #shoereview, #shoecobbler, #shoerepair, #resole, #shoeresole, #doublemonkstraps, #doublemonk, #monkstrap, #shoerefurbishment

Id: 8lRZoD6YETg

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019