Raising Heels to 4 inches on Western Boots

[Firefox]

Here's a few illustrations of one of my projects.

This is the unmodified Sancho boot, size 41 with a 3 1/4" heel:

Removal of the top piece showed the heel is hollow plastic inside on this model. To fit on the wooden stack piece it is necessary to use long screws or infill the heel with resin. I chose the former approach.

I then fitted back the rubber top piece screwing into the wood, and an additional 6mm top piece of rubber from a heel repair material sold at woolworths.

The thickness of the wood was 14mm and the additional top piece was 6mm making a total heght increase of 20mm, just over 3/4". This is the most I would reccomend adding to a shoe. A small shank bend completes the job with a hard vamp bend to restore toe-spring. The uppers are slightly distorted, but this is a quality boot and they mould to the new shape with every step.

Of course each bit of rubber/wood is cut slightly large and very carefully ground and filed with progressively finer tools to produce a seamless curve on the heel. You need a little bit of craft experience to get this right, but it soon comes with practice. Then the heel is painted black to match. I toned down the cream leather styling with shoe dye/polish.

I hope these ideas will encourage other people to have a go at modifying shoes, especially where they can't get the heels they want in their sizes.

_______________

Believe in your right to wear what you want

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Firefox on 2002-04-15 01:12 ]</font>

[Arctic]

FF, your images are not showing up right, but I'm dying to see the results as I'm in the middle of doing this myself too. Could you put your pictures on another server please? Bert

[Firefox]

Sorry they didn't show up. I put them on another server and I hope they work now.

[Arctic]

Works fine now. Thanks for fixing. I'm amazed how smooth the transition is, you really can't see anything from the pictures... Bert

[Firefox]

Thanks Bert. There should be definitely less excuses from people of not being able to find heels in their size now. There are lots of 2" mens heels around, and the addition of an extra 3/4" or even 1" on suitable models will be a good start to a higher heeled profile,

[Arctic]

As I got a new pair of cowboy boots with true 3" heels a few days ago I brought my 2.5" ones to the shoemaker for raising the heels by an inch. My wife lets me wear these 3" outside with her so there is defenitely no reason for keeping anything below that . The shoemaker was not at all convinced that it would be a good idea, but I told him to give it a shot anyway. Next thursday they will be ready, let's see what the result is going to be like. I could have tried it myself, but these were so nice boots (original Frye's) that I rather have it done by a pro. I got some other pairs, even a pair in black, that I could do some experimenting on... Yeah, let's do that this weekend! Bert

[Firefox]

The shoemaker was probably right. An inch is a lot. The main concerns are maintaining the toe spring dimension, distortion at the vamp, uppers wrong at the ankle, and over bending or loosening of the shank. Some shanks seem to bend well, in the right places, and remain firm, while others work badly. Having said all that, shoe materials tend to flex with time so the new shape can often be achieved if it is not too much of a distortion. I'd be interested to see "before" and "after" photos of your project if you have them.

[Arctic]

It went great!!! I can recommend the exercise to anyone..!

The paint and glue are drying right now, and I'm convinced that they will be fine. I raised the heel from 5 cm / 2" to about 9 cm. I still have to measure the final outcome. Actually, I removed the old heels completely and made new ones from scratch.

I got a lot of "before", "after" and "during" pictures. I hope they will be ok, most are still in the digital camera.

When I put them on for the first time, I got a real high-heel experience! Wow! My good ol' trusted boring cowboy boots took me to new heights

I was amazed to see how well they took the quite dramatic deformation, but it remains to be seen what the outcome will be after regular use.

It took A LOT of time. I must have spent about 10-12h in the process. Of course I tried to be as careful as possible to get it all right first time, nothing is in a straight angle of course and I have only hand tools. Especially the curve in the back was hard, but it turned out fine.

In a few days when I will hopefully have some time for it, I'll post a long story on how it went.

It's good my wife was out, since it made a terrible mess (wood dust all over the place) and awful noise using the jig-saw.

Here is some picture I made in the process!

Bert

[Firefox]

That looks a really nice job Bert, and when the heel is painted, it will blend superbly. The uppers will stretch a bit over time, but if you wear them inside trousers you wont notice them. I've got a similar pair of boots I bought in a charity (thrift shop) but they are a big size 8 UK and I need to wear a pair of very thick socks. Still, if I follow your heel shape idea I will be able to make use of them if I can get about a 3 3/4" heel.

[Arctic]

Hello

like Firefox said, if you can't find heels in your size, just make them yourself! I went with these boots to the shoemaker a few days ago and he said that raising the heels of these would not be a good idea. I wasn't wearing these anymore anyway (only 2" heels, way too low ) so I thought to give it a shot myself anyway. Sounds tough, but if you are willing to put up with somewhat lower quality and finish than a real bootmaker would be able to, it's really worth a try.

Unfortunately I don't have a workshop or anything where I can do this kind of work (there aren't that many who do have one in downtown Helsinki I'd say) so it had to happen in our appartment. For understandable reasons, partners defenitely don't like this kind of thing. It leaves a trail of dust all over the place. I vacuumed everything 3 times to get the mess out before my wife came back. But she didn't notice anything unusual - good!

I don't have 2 left hands, but I'm defenitely not a skilled craftsman either. If you measure twice and cut once, check often, and use common sense there isn't too much that can go wrong.

I bought these boots over 10 years ago in Tongeren, Belgium. They were great at the time, and the 2" felt really like a heel, even if I didn't know at that time that I would get so much into this stuff later. I wore them a lot, even if my parents didn't allow me to (and I agree, they look kind of rough). They were re-soled several times, but are still in excellent shape.

Just raising the heels in a similar fashion than FF did was not possible as the heels were very underslung. Adding an inch or so would have resulted in a heel pad the surface area of a stiletto, not exactly what I was looking for. So removing the heel and replacing it with something else was the only option.

Then, the question came: with which material? I was considering using real layers of leather, like the original heels. But then, it would be very hard to get hold of that leather, I don't have a press, nor the right kind of glue nor a machine to shape it, and I thought a manual file would not do the job. Wood is probably not the best option, but it is easy to get hold of, easy to process, cut, sandpaper, file etc. Then there is also a lot of choice in differend kinds of wood, so the characteristics span quite a large range. After some wood store research, I ended up with a piece of heat treated aspen, which is used extensively here for saunas. It has excellent heat transfer characteristics (ie a good isolator so you don't burn your lower back on a 100 centigrade bench) and it doesn't "bleed" when heated. Those things aren't that important for heels perhaps, but it seemed like a light, stiff, easy to handle material. Other kinds, like pine and oak, were either too hard, or spongy, or heavy. The chunk of wood I ended up with was 28mm thick, excellent for heel making as it means 3 layers under an angle with a rubber cap is enough for 4".

You need some tools of course. I had everything here, except a rough file, which I went to the local Bauhaus for and set me back for just 8 EUR.

Not everything is here I just noticed, like the hammer, nails, and a 30 cm long iron rod (to reach the nails on the sole of the boot through the shaft), but you get the idea.

I used my 3" Acme boots as an example for the shape of the heel. The heel cap of the "new" boots is exactly the same size as the 3" Acmes.

I removed the heel, which really wasn't easy. 10 years of use hadn't made these loose yet. I used a screwdriver, a blade cutter and a lot of cursing to get it off. The glue which they used was really of the nasty kind. The heel broke in two, but that was not a real problem.

For the highest layer, I used the old heel to draw the oudline on the wood. I made it a few mm too large in all dimensions of course to have some margin.

Then the noisy and dusty part comes... I used a jig-saw to cut out the layers of wood. Goes fine and fast if you have the right kind of blade.

I did that 3 times, from larger to smaller, and the result is this:

When I put the three chunks of wood on top of eachother beside the 3" Acme boot, I knew this was going to work, except for how to get the dust out of our place.

I used good old trusted Pattex glue to stick the different layers together. It really sticks awfully well if you use it like described!

"...for maximal final strength, the pressure is important and not the duration..." said the tube, so I used a clamps (is that the right term for such a thing?) and let it sit there while getting something to munch on. It starts to look like a heel already, doesn't it?

Now it's time for the tricky part: the filing. This took a lot of time, since I didn't want to ruin it in this phase already. The filing is quite hard, especially since the heel is all rounded and under and angle. But I thought it would be the easiest if I would consider the line between the heel pad and the bottom of the sole as straight and moved my file accordingly, which means vertically. I had drawn the heel pad final shape on the bottom of the heel and the outline of the sole on the top so that made it possible to check the progress. It's hard to explain in any language but I'm sure you get the idea if you have some 3-dimensional imagination.

Then, since I'm not the skinniest guy on the block, some extra strength wouldn't hurt, and I drove 3 long wood screws through the 3 corners of the heel. It's good to have a cordless drill for those kind of things or your wrists will kill you the day after. I didn't drill the hole for the screw too loosely of course...

One particular tough thing is the fact that the bottom of the sole and the bottom of the heel are not in parallel with each other. Getting that right takes some patience and good measuring.

One of the many intermediate checks. The open ATX case, soldering iron, IDE cable, CPU cooler and ISDN TAs are not part of the project Please note here and in the following picture that I had to take some material away from the top of the heel as well as the sole is not 100% flat.

It's now time to put the heel on. I tried to get those nails out and fix the new heel with other nails or crews but the old nails were so stuck into the sole that there was a serious risk of damaging the sole. Therefore I decided to put them all in the same direction with a pair of pliers (not yet happened on the picture) and get the heel on by drilling first a 2 mm hole where each nail would be. You can see that the boot is made enturely of non-artificial materials. No wonder it was so expensive at the time.

Old versus new...

In the picture below you can see that the heel is still a mm or so wider than the sole of the boot, but I did that on purpose so I could sandpaper away the last imperfections. It turned out that I couldn't get it in real perfect shape, but good enough anyway.

After the sandpaper job, some color need to be applied. Since the boots were black, it wasn't that hard to make it look all the same. I used ordinary thick mat wood paint. I did this on the terrace of course, didn't want to risk to ruin or wooden floor. You can see also what was for sale in the local Citymarket last weekend

The near-final product looks as below:

Not too bad for an amateur, eh? I could have sandpapered the heels just a bit more, so the finish would have been a bit better, but you only see that in close up...

The final stage was the application of the heelcaps. It was a nightmare to find a stupid piece of rubber that was thick enough and hard enough to be used as a heelcap!! There aren't that many shoemakers in the area but the two that were open said that they couldn't sell me just the rubber, they needed to get the job as well...!! What &%#¤* system is that... The whole fun was in being it able to do it all by myself. I went into warehouses, construction material stores, hardware stores, you name it. No rubber sheets that were thick and large enough! I could find floormats in rubber, sandpaper blocks, vibration blocks, 2mm thick sheets for gaskets, whatever, but nothing like this. I finally got saved by the local Volvo dealership (http://www.bilia.fi) who sold me a rubber cover for a brake pedal for 10 EUR... I think it's outrageous, if you can buy a whole tyre for three times that money which needs 500 times the amound of material... I was trying to find a mudflap actually, but it seems that those things don't exist anymore...? So, all to Volvo for your heelcaps.

So... want to know how they feel? Well.. how do I put this... they are ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! I simply can't believe it. The heel ended up being exactly 9.1mm high, by the standards of this board totally flat perhaps, but they give an EXTREMELY strong high heel feeling!! They defenitely beat my 5" stilettos hands down. I don't have an explanation for it yet. I wore my 8.6cm Bronx boots after these, and they felt like flats!!! I haven't had this kind of experience for a very long time, and can't wait to get the chance to try them again. In the first few minutes it was a bit strange, but then they felt like made for the purpose...! So, the heels are up a full 4cm, from 5cm to 9cm, and the first few km went great!! No deformations, no cracks, no blisters, nothing. In the pictures they look somewhat distorted, but when wearing them they are totally ok from what I can tell.

So, bottom line:

- they look ok to me (eye of the beholder )

- they are not too intruisive (9 cm cowboys don't cath too much attention)

- they fit like a glove

- they give an extreme high heel feeling

- they were dirt cheap (the brake pedal cover was the big money in the project )

My wife may even accept them! It doesn't get any better than this, does it? Think about it, a dirt cheap, socially acceptable, non-intruisive extremely strong high heel feeling boot!

I can recommend to anyone giving it a try. If you have some old 2-3" boots somewhere and you want to have a not too eye catching high heels, a good time, a sense of achievement, some hand work vs. typical office work that most of us do, and the feeling that you have created something that is not for sale - give it a go! I can't guarantee that your boots/shoes take a 4" raise, but if they don't, well throw them away and start all over.

I can't recall being this excited about something for a long time

Bert

[Arctic]

And yeah, they are MUCH better IRL then on those pictures Bert

[Firefox]

Excellent project report and photos. Would it be alright to use these on the aesthetic men's heeled fashion website in the shoe modification section? I would give due acknowledgement to yourself of course under the name Bert or any other name you wanted or even anon.

[Arctic]

Sure, go ahead. You can use my own name, if you wish. In the process you may want to correct the most blatant violations of English grammar Bert

[Dr. Shoe]

PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT try heel remodeling without seeking advice first! If you simply add to the heel, then you will find that the heel will start to "kick out" because you are tilting the shoe forward and as the angle beetween the seat of the shoe and the top of the heel remains the same the "top piece" or heel tip will be in the wrong position in relation to your centre of gravity. With a block heel it won't be apparent but a few weeks wear will reveal more wear to the front of the heel than the back. Though it has to be said that you may be fortunate because heels are made to accommodate up to three sizes so if you have a size nine shoe with a "6X9" heel (that's how it would be marked) then you could add up to an inch without too much trouble, but on a size 6 shoe you would end up with either a broken heel or a broken ankle. Sadly you have no way of knowing without taking the heel off and examining it. Actually, there is no such thing as a stacked leather heel. Any heel that appears this way is actually plastic covered with strips of veneer. It is dangerous to build up a heel with many layers of material ESPECIALLY leather as this will shear with your first step. Wood is a fine material for heel making. Beech is ideal but if you are going to cover the heel pine or any softwood is ok but for best results use a hardwood, remember that the grain should go vertically for a heel and horizontally for a wooden sole. Bending a shank is a bit dodgy. It can snap, buckle or come loose. If this happens your shoe is ruined, also it could be dangerous to try and walk in a shoe like this. I'm not saying that heel raisng should not be attempted, just don't try it on an expensive pair unless you are sure that you know what you are doing!

[Firefox]

I've added to loads of heels with no problem. Faint heart never won fair shoes! I'd say just do it. Practice on an old pair first, or get shoes from thrift shops for a couple of $$ and practcie taking them apart and doing mods.

[Texboots]

In response to Dr. Shoe, I don't know where you buy your boots, but stacked leather heels are absolutely what are used on all quality cowboy boots. Anyone who says that they don't exist is totally un-informed. All of my cowboy boots have stacked leather heels, including the boots I've made myself. And my heels go from 3" up to 7" in height, all composed from layers of leather glued and nailed together, and not one has ever "sheared". No self-respecting cowboy would be caught dead in boots with plastic heels. Well, stilettos with plastic heels maybe... Bert, you did a great job with those heels. I suspect that raising the heels without reforming the metal shank in the arch is what gives you that total sensitivity to the height. This is opposed to boots that have been lasted for heels that high, in which the shank is specifically shaped to create a smooth curved transition from the heel to the ball of the foot. Congratulations! You can wear those boots in Texas anytime! And when you come over, bring some boots and we'll add some LEATHER to the heels in my shop. Like Firefox says, just do it!

[Dr. Shoe]

I am simply going by what I have been taught in good faith. However, further research shows that cowboy boots ARE made with stack leather but this is an exception rather than a rule. These heels should not be undertaken by anyone who does not know what they are doing as is being proposed in this thread. Certainly adding stratae of different materials can lead to a number of unforeseen problems particularly on footwear with a small toespring. My advice would be to have the work done by a professional who would almost certainly have the right tools and materials to hand.

[Firefox]

My advice would be to have a go yourself. I've had no professional training in shoe repair but have made many satisfactory modifications at a fraction of cost of professional work and done some things they might not undertake on account of not being cost effective. Any one with reasonable craft skills can do it. It's certainly not rocket science, and it's an absorbing hobby. You must of course take responsibility for your own work, but have confidence, make things strong, and you won't go far wrong.