How Waterproof Work Boots are Made

Since I’ve been living in Connecticut most of my life cold wet winters are always a given. You quickly learn how to properly dress warmly with properly insulated coats, scarves and gloves. Watching the Weather report becomes a necessity. In is in these conditions in New England that waterproof insulated work boots were born. Anyone who truly cares about dry warm feet in the winter while they are outside will have a pair of waterproof leather boots. Now boots of this type didn’t always exist. Old fashioned work boots would leak water like faulty pipes. It took an invention almost a revolution in footwear technology to make waterproof workboots.

Before waterproof leather boots, Boots were made in a traditional manner of sewing leather pieces together to form an upper and using a heavy needle sewing machine to stitch the upper to the sole. Guess what, nothing waterproof about that. It took the man by the name of Swartz to completely reinvent the wheel in boot technology. Nathan Swartz looked at the traditional work boot and noticed where the leaks were coming from and figured the steps needed to correct them. The first thing he did was come up with an new type of boot sole that is made by injection molding technology. With injection molding the sole is made in one piece and doesn’t have any stitching that would cause leaks. The second thing was to attach the injection mold sole to the upper without sewing either. You getting the picture? He attached the sole to the upper with direct attachment technology which basically uses glue, high pressure and heat in a vulcanization machine to permanantly attach the sole in a completely waterproof manner.

For the leather upper part of the boot, two things are needed. First waterproof leather that doesn’t let water seep in and waterproof construction. For the leather, the factory uses leather that has been impregnated with silicone that simply doesn’t let water to penetrate and the second part is cementing the seams. Since boots are nothing more than a bunch of pieces of leather all sewn together, there are a lot of seams. By using a waterproof cement on the seams. There will be no little needle holes that let water in keeping your feet dry and toasty. Well since it’s invention in the early 1970s, the timberland waterproof workboot has been copied by virtually all of the other boot manufacturers.