John Lobb Double Monk Straps | The Most Expensive Restoration We've Ever Done?

welcome back y'all so we have a really good one for you today a gentleman sent us a pair of john lobb double monk straps and what was supposed to be just a simple resole is not a simple result it was supposed to be just seoul hill reuse blocks get out the door and uh when we we started looking at them we noticed that the welt was had pulled away and then we noticed that uh as we got to the next layer that we had to replace the insoles because they were just completely waffled then we got to the next thing and realized that the welt that where it goes actually through the upper where the wells goes through was completely like ripped apart it was in bad shape so in other words yeah these shoes were completely and utterly shot yeah but we didn't charge the customer full boat for this one we just wanted to have some fun so we actually called the guy and said you know what we're going to take care of it we just want to show a awesome video yes for all of you folks and sometimes if we get a good video we're like hey we just get a good video and it's for y'all yeah so we uh decided to do the works to this shoe and we hope you'll stick around and enjoy but before we go before we show you the works can you show us one of these please hit the subscribe button and just show us some love and help us to know that you are looking forward to this video let's go [Music] all right you also as trent mentioned these john lobb double monks he got them second hand and they're kind of all wonky just based on the previous wearer's foot that is kind of a something you need to watch out for when you buy a second-hand pair is especially if they're good you're welted but a lot of shoes will do it if it's got a leather footbed it will form to your foot and uh if you get it and it's different from the guy before it'll form to their foot and not yours but we can take care of that we're gonna do it on this one and we're gonna get a little bit creative with this now i'm going to get this top left off you can actually see that this is blind stitched and while i take this off for those that don't know i'll explain a blind stitch means just that the stitches are invisible they're actually hidden underneath the leather and we're going to do the same thing and you'll see exactly what i'm talking [Applause] about all right for those who aren't familiar with shoe construction or signs of a high quality shoe a stack leather block is simply a stacked block it's leathers it's it's layers of leather there we go uh vegetable tan leather that are all stacked on top of each other and they're pretty flimsy until you put them all together and they're glued and nailed and then become hard as a rock but it's not just one chunk of plastic or or wood they can be but you know it's just not the best stack leather that's the way to go and i would expect no less from john lobb all right so while i take the sole off tell you a little bit about this particular shoe so the gentleman who bought this shoe was you know he didn't know much about it like it was secondhand and so he reached out to john lobb and as it turns out most shoes um have a code you know like a lot of things you can look at the code and it'll tell you what year was made maybe what factor it came from if there's multiple factories but with john lobb they actually had changed to a new system and the lady who the customer had was talking to says she wasn't familiar with the old system so good customer service coming from john lobb a lot of companies would just be like well we're not really sure and just move on but she said let me go find the answer for you and went and tracked down an old timer who was still working at the factory and was very familiar with the new i mean the old system and it turns out that these were made in the early 2000s i think he said around 2001 2002 but yeah good customer service coming out of lob don't know if y'all can hear that but it is raining really hard outside so max may or may not be picking that up all right so here's the inside of the shoe um we've got to remove this shank and as you can see it's all warped um to the other guy's foot that's not going to be comfortable if you put your foot in there and go wearing it all day so we're going to replace this all right so we've gone we've marked where we want everything to line back up when we put the new one in we need to know where those marks are going to go all right so here's where we're at once we got the solves off and we started looking at the uh the insole and we were going to replace the insole anyways we noticed that the rib was pretty shot and even worse than that the upper where the wealth actually stitches through the upper and then through the rib was completely like swiss cheese and what that tells me is that these shoes have been done numerous times maybe even sent back to the manufacturer to have them redone and every time you send it back even the manufacturer can only give your welt a shoe so many times hand welding is a little bit different but a machine it's going to poke new holes through it and before that upper just turns to swiss cheese and that's what we were facing with this so we had to make a little bit of modification i actually learned this trick from a shoemaker in london and so this is what we had to do and you can see where the stitch line was and we basically just went through and we cut it off right the stitch line because the stitch line is up tucked up underneath anyways you don't see it and so that's a good place we don't want to go above it or you're going to see it afterwards so we got a piece of calf skin and cat skin lining and we we skied those down paper thin and then we tucked it up up in between the upper and the lining on the inside and glued it for quite a while until it really bonded and i mean it's not coming out so what that does is it now gives me a fresh two layers of leather that when i stitch the well tone the needle goes through and it's going to hold it and all this is going to be tucked you won't see it at all once the wealth's on and we'll show you what you mean as soon as we put new welts on and we put them on the new insole okay so we have got the new insole in here and something that's a little bit different uh that i decided to do on this one just to add a little extra security because we're having to modify the upper is i went ahead when i put the new rib in instead of just using a like a one inch strip of canvas that goes around i just did the whole thing so it wraps around and it can't come unglued and shift because either way it pulls it's uh it's adhered down to the leather all the way across so this is something that's kind of like alton dust and um i like it okay so i'm going to re-weld this thing but since i had had to add an extra layer of calf skin and it's not molded but it's adhered to the former upper that is molded i'm not going to start at the end like the back end on one side of the other and then just weld around i'm actually going to start at the toe do one side back to it and i go back to the toe and do the other side that way there's no shifting and the original will stay exactly the way it's supposed to so let's rewelt this thing so so now that we've got it welted we don't need this extra leather and when the shoe is being made uh it actually wounds up looking like this extra leather where it's been lasted over and welted through and then usually a machine will come through and cut it off when it's handmade so cut off by hand but it served its purpose here all right so you see we've got the shank inside and let y'all know a lot of times these uh need to be replaced but if they're in good shape um then we're gonna reuse them and i mean i could put metal shanks in there but a lot of people don't like metal shanks because they do add a little bit of uh weight to them and the old reason was you know people say going through metal detectors and airports well you know with things the way they are now you gotta basically strip naked to get on an airplane but uh we're gonna use the same ones that lob put in all right so the reason why we didn't put cork all back here is that he actually wants to have a little bit of a fiddle built in and so this is actually going to be replaced with a piece of leather and then we'll start stacking our our leather pieces up and they'll get smaller and smaller until there's a ridge so that's what this little piece is it's going to be the filler and the base in lieu of cork all right so we've got our layers of our fiddle stacked up and we have to scave them down i've already actually uh scaved the one up underneath and so we got one two three layers and we're going to skive this one down to match the angle of this one and then we're going to have to make this hat match this hat by cutting it this way and we'll kind of get it smoothed out a little bit but the idea is to have a transition and then you've got this ridge that'll allow the sole to curve around it [Music] so so so [Applause] so okay so we're going to start building the hill now and there's two ways of doing this you can either just start getting layers and layering it up or you can actually use a split ran and it's just a strip of leather it's actually kind of more the traditional way of doing it and since the heel is uh kind of concave you have to take up different angles and it's kind of a three-dimensional thing so if you take a piece of leather and you scave it down this way you can actually bend it into like a horseshoe but to make it a little easier to bend you just cut out little notches all right so this is what it looks like once you put it on and it's thicker on the outside it's tapered but this is curved down this way so if you actually look at it from down it's a lot flatter than it would be if you just got a piece of leather and sat it down if you did that you'd actually have to wind up sanding or cutting off the middle portion so now we can actually take our leathers and start stacking them up so ah all right so we are almost done with these but we have to put some decorative hill tacks in here just wouldn't be complete without them a little bit more work and waxing on the soles and get them shined up and we'll be done using a little compass like this makes a whole lot easier for spacing so [Music] okay guys so it's time to put some conditioner and polish on these john lobs now as you can see on this pair and i just want to bring attention to this one it does have some really rough cracking going on right here on the vamp now again this is the reason you really really want to make sure that you're conditioning your shoes now the cracks go pretty far into the the leather so there's not a whole lot we can do to it yeah you can put some resin on it and sure you can try sanding it down just to kind of camouflage it but when you start flexing again again those cracks are so deep it's not really worth it and it's just going to end up looking bad again so because this is the only spot really on this pair of shoes we're just going to condition these really well again put some more polish on it and that's about all we can really do but after that we'll be good to go okay guys before we show you the final product could you do us a big favor i know we asked this in all of our videos but it really does mean a lot to us if you like this video and you enjoy the content that we're putting out for you guys if you would please give us a thumbs up go ahead take two seconds just to hit that button it really shows youtube and it shows us that you're liking this content and you'd like to see more of it and it inspires us to give you more yeah exactly you know if we only get a few thumbs up you know what's the incentive but also if you are enjoying this channel please hit the subscribe button so that you can get more of this content we're always here making these videos each week on top of our full-time job here to try to inform you guys educate you ladies and gentlemen on shoe care and leather and whatnot so definitely think about subscribing to our channel okay let's get to what we've done eighth all right so besides the shoe physically aging me um it took two and a half days two and a half days two and a half days to do this it wasn't gonna be that long when we first started it's not been just you know several hours yeah uh but when it took a full day just to try to save the upper and at that point we were already invested in it yeah and it became like a challenge like again like we said at the beginning of the video we thought it was going to be a simple resole and and just to kind of give you some some backstory on this shoe this was a gentleman who sent this pair of lobs into us several months ago and we were going to work on them but we told him hey i'll tell you what we're super backed up with work if you let us just hold on to these until we can get caught up we'll do your shoes and we will kind of go above and beyond your on your shoes but we had no idea how much more we were going to do on this pair of shoes so what this guy wanted to do was um we wanted to add a little bit of a twist to it and kind of spruce them up a little bit kind of get that a little bit bespoke look even though these are john lobb ready to wear we wanted he wanted to add a fiddle down the uh the spine of it there right through the waist so we actually did that stacked it up the real way with leather and put some jrs uh some jr classic kills on there kind of kept it the way it originally was at least um closed channel we yeah we were close channel we um put a new welt on we actually didn't go with a spade waste we just left that and yeah and and again that was on top of then completely just having to transform the upper per se of the shoe because it was so rotted out per se that it was really rotted perforated way too many times because the needle has just gone through so many times it starts to just fall apart yeah and that that is probably what took us so long to get this shoe done so again this was probably the longest shoe that we've ever had to work on and it would have been our most expensive repair ever he got a good deal on that one oh dude knocked it all apart well done sir well done and thanks again for sending them in to us we appreciate it okay that just about does it and again guys we appreciate you joining us and until next time y'all have a good [Music] day [Music] you

Channel: Trenton & Heath

Views: 1,228,879

Rating: 4.9565611 out of 5

Keywords: #johnlobb, shoerepair, restoration, repair, doublemonkstrap, mensshoes, shoecobbler, saphir

Id: qwAh1lq7Rts

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MyCoffeeIsCold]

The work is great, but for a first time watcher of their content, I have no idea what they are talking about. Would be nice if they explained it all with a bit less jargon.

[u/joshq68]

If y'all like these guys you should check out bedos leatherworks, his youtube channel is great and makes a ton of content.

[u/MacStylee]

These shoe repair videos all seem to feature guys cutting / pushing very sharp things into their hand. I guess this is just the way these guys work, but from the outside it looks terrifying.

[u/jas98mac]

Looked up John Lobb shoes. I can’t ever see paying $1500 US for a pair of shoes. I would never take them outside.

[u/tapomirbowles]

I mean, beside from the fact that I think the shoes are butt ugly.. that is some absolutely perfect handcrafted work they did. I dont think anyone wouldnt appreciate the amount of care and detail they put into that.

[u/eezyE4free]

Skipped too many steps and too much talking for me. I like the subtitled videos from this sub better. Good to see a new subject though.

[u/brine85]

Sweet!

[u/clientnotfound]

I came across these guys about a month ago and have watched every video on their channel.

[u/jjackjos4]

I can’t believe I just watched all of this and I don’t even like shoes but nice fix