You teacored your teacore boots. Rad. Now these boots are uniquely yours. Bet they'll look even better with bits of green showing through.Next up are my Wesco x Standard and Strange Knuckle Draggers in Horween dark olive waxed flesh
These boots should be higher on my list of favorite boots than they are (this is #11). Wesco makes a beautifully designed engineer boot on the MP toe last, especially with all the nice details that Standard and Strange chose. They took forever to break in, but now that they have broken in they are almost comfortable. This pair of boots has an actual double midsole and it took absolutely forever to break these things in. I had a lot less boots when I first got these and it still took me a whole year to break these in. In addition, there are a few personal issues that I have with them that have placed them so far down on this list, which is probably a shockingly low placement for people who know how much I love engineer boots. The construction is solid and the finishing is OK, so that is not the issue I have with them, though I do wish they were more even with their SPI on the area where the vamp and shaft meet. Wesco, like Nick's, Whites, and Viberg aren't known for gorgeous construction and these are no exception. There's nothing wonky which is nice, but it's not as beautiful in terms of finishing as many of my other boots.
No, the two biggest issues with these are the heel slip and the leather. Heel slip is inevitable on an engineer boot and I have no issue with that in general. At this point, I am just used to it. I have worn engineers all day long walking around Japan with no issue. However, even after break in the heel slip on these is absolutely atrocious. If I will be walking a lot during the day, I cannot wear these. I also fell out of love with the leather. It’s not black or brown and everyone thought it was black so I just overdyed them black myself. They look better now, but I just wish I had chosen a different leather, such as the natural veg tan on the Van Cleef engineers. There will be a follow up review on these boots in the near future to discuss all of this more, so look out for that.
The pictures will actually chronicle how I have changed the look of these over time.
This is how they looked originally:
After a couple of years, I decided to make them actually black, especially because they usually looked black anyway. I just polished them with black shoe polish and they looked like this:
I didn't love this because it was kind of half-hearted. I decided to actually dye them black all over. This was done in October with Saphir leather dye.
This was better, but it still wasn't quite right. They were too matte. My buddy, Kreosote boots (a bootmaker in the US) gave me some tips on polishing them to improve the look. I ended up conditioning them and then wax polishing them all over and now they look MUCH better than they did with just the polish and just the dye.
I'm not saying this is an actual improvement over the original, but I like it a lot more. I don't love boots that I can't match easily to my leather jackets and now these match very well with my Freewheelers Mulholland. I'm pretty happy with how they look now.