Captoe Roughouts: Shoe, Service Type III: The other roughout boot
Date: 3/12/2010
Author: Chris Guska
The Project
After asking the usual suspects if they had interest in making a commercial sized run of Type III Service Shoes and receiving a resounding no, I started looking around for a potential "host" boot to try a conversion on.
Authors side note, the "No" responses were very well qualified with the following 2 reasons:
1.) Reenactors have a hard enough time "understanding" and "choosing" amongst the current options of Service Shoes, Roughouts, Combat Boots, and Tall brown boots for HOOAH types. Hopefully this article will take one step in rectifying, or adding to the confusion.
2.) The financial outlay involved is borderline ridiculous. In one instance, the manufacturer wants FULL PAYMENT - UP FRONT, with 1 year lead time till product delivery. This is all after the pattern and samples have been worked out, at your cost. This simply does not make any kind of reasonable business sense for the reenactment vendor. Its not the way to run a business...
Enter the "host" boot. Charles and Josh clued me into the Red Wing Iron Ranger line of boots, which had a striking resemblance to the Captoe Roughout in the few internet photos I was able to find of it.
The Iron Rangers come in a variety of styles, one of which being a "Muleskinner" roughout version. I decided that this was the boot to use for the attempted conversion, until I saw the retail price. Iron Rangers, being a premium boot from a premium brand demand a premium price when new - at approx $250 to $300 a pair. With that pricepoint being totally unacceptable to me, especially for an experiment that I was unsure if it would even work out, I started searching on eBay. Several months later, I was able to snag a used pair off of eBay for $90.00 shipped, which is just about the cost of a pair of new boots from Sturm or At The Front.
The Iron Rangers
The boots as they come from Red Wing have the following "flaws", which I will list as either correctable or uncorrectable:
Correctable
1.) Eyelets / Speed Hooks - changing to a correct type. See below about numbers
2.) Soles / Heels
3.) Lack of Rivets
4.) Dubbing
5.) Laces
Uncorrectable
1.) Toe box / Captoe Shape
2.) Stitching at the top of the boot
3.) Stitching pattern where the uppers meet the vamp
4.) Thread color(s)
5.) Some internal details
6.) Wrong number of eyelets. Originals have 8 (sometimes 9), the Iron Rangers have 7.
With those things in mind, I began the conversion process to try and address what I could correct to make them look as close to the original captoe roughouts in my collection as possible.
Page 1: Background
Page 3: The Conversion
Page 4: Comparisons and Conclusions
