 G'day, welcome to Boutlossophie and if you haven't been here before, my name is Tech. Now today I'm coming to you while I'm on vacation from Pemberton in the great southern region of Western Australia and I want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands around here, the Biberman Wadundi people of the Greater Nungar Nation. Pemberton is well known for its hardwood forest and interspersed between the wine region in this great southern region of Western Australia. Now today though I'm not going to look at wine, I'm going to take a look at this pair of Truman boots in their 79 last in Seidel's Light Natural Limerick. So I'm on vacation here in Pemberton and I've been hiking through the great hardwood forest trails around here. So I thought what better place to review these Truman boots in Light Natural Limerick. This is Truman's standard capto 6-inch work boot slash service boot design on their most popular 79 last and in this case made up from Seidel Tannery's Light Natural Limerick. The false tongue that you see here is an aftermarket kilty made of lore tanning shrunken bison and comes from my friend Dale Eroser for LV's business Dale's Leatherworks. I have reviewed this pair of Truman boots before and I'll leave links to those videos below. So this is going to be a relatively short video just to let you know how they've worn in the last year and a half. If you want all the details about their construction styling them in leather care go check out my full review from last December which is up there. I will however quickly talk about Truman boots here because they've entered into the next phase of development. For those of you who don't know Truman boots was started in 2014 by Vince Romano. The company is named after the owner's border collie Truman. Truman first started making their boots in the American eastern state of Pennsylvania and then moved to Colorado and then moved again to finally settle in Oregon in the American Northwest. They created basically what is one designer boot but varied it by offering three different lasts a few different outsoles making some plain toe and others with a cap toe like this they have a taller shaft model called the Upland and offering what was really an amazing range of very interesting leathers from Horween, Charles F. Stead and Seidel just to name a few. When they started they went with a 270 degree stitch down construction model but in time changed to a good year construction presumably for speed of manufacture. Over their evolution they have used foam fillers on any inside as well as cork fillers and they're now I think back to cork fillers. They've also gone between fiberglass and steel shanks in their builds. Recently they've also rationalized their outsoles options and mainly now source from the UK Idside company and I think make their own Eugene outsole. The retail model was direct to consumer online and relied on a built-to-order model where they started making your boot when you ordered it. From time to time they had some made-to-order runs where you could vary some of the options. COVID caused the same production issues as all other bootmakers where the supply chains were so stuffed up that build times just skyrocketed and obviously Vince saw the writing on the wall then if not before and started planning to convert to a more and more ready to ship boots. Now don't discount this move so easily. Imagine building up production so that you put boots in the stock room instead of immediately earning money by shipping them out as they're built. As a business advisor I can see this takes a long-term business instinct. Not a small amount of work in capital put away to finance the production and some courage. Many of you are probably not small business owners out there but imagine if you were earning money as you sell your goods and then deciding to practically stop selling until you build up stock. However you plan it there's going to be a hit on cash flow. Nevertheless they have started this and just a few weeks ago they announced at the end of June that all boots would be made ready to ship with only a few limited MTOs that would be offered in future. When they announced this I took a look at their website and where they once offered I don't know maybe 20 plus different types of boots to be built to order there were only five different makeups on the website and some of them with a really small range of available sizes. I'm guessing and hoping for them that gradually this list of offerings will or has maybe since grown so go check out their website. I will leave a link to their website below. Now it's not an affiliate link so I don't earn anything. So if you decide to buy something from the website you can always come back here and leave me a super thanks by clicking the thanks button below okay. Now let's take a look at how these boots have worn over the last year and a half or so. Honestly though I do have an insane number of boots and even though I'm starting to thin the herd and I'm selling some I still have a gigantic rotation. That means I wear my boots regularly but not at all frequently enough to call them everyday boots. Although I do have the ones I reach out to a lot and then maybe a second tier that I reach out to more than the others and finally there are those that I sort of have to remind myself to wear. This pair fits in that second category and in summary I kind of wear them heavily for a week or two and then I don't pick them up again for another couple of months. If you twist it my arm I think I'd have to think back and say that I've worn these maybe about 120 130 times over the last 18 or 19 months. But and this is a big but I think I have tended to wear them hard. I pull them on when I'm working in the yard for example or a couple of times I was doing some light construction work as I remodeled the kitchen and a bathroom or especially when I go out on long full day or half day hikes around where I live or in forest tracks like around here where I'm filming. So they have seen some hard and rough use and I do feel that it's fair to look at them as long-term wear in that context. Now first of all the uppers have worn really well. When I first reviewed these I emailed Seidel to ask how the leathers was tanned and I never got a reply but later they did get back to me after a few people told them about my video and they told me about the limerick tannage. It's combination chrome and veg tanned leather. It's made on a base chrome tannage and then re-tanned with a ton of vegetable extract to give it the look and feel of veg tanned leather without taking on the brittle characteristics and other unfriendly characteristics of veg tanning. It's then treated with added wax and comes out as a waxy pull-up leather. I have conditioned these a couple of times now using waxy balms like the RM Williams saddle conditioner and an Australian product called oak wood which also includes some eucalyptus oils in the formula. I prefer the waxy balms because the leather feels waxy rather than oily and I've avoided mink oil or neat foot oil because I think that might wet and darken the leather. Each time the conditioner soaks in quite quickly as if the leather was dry but it's not really because you can feel a waxiness in it and you always get a really strong pull-up effect under the surface. I found the leather to be really durable under some tough and scratchy conditions over rocks and fallen timbers and forest trails and because of the waxy treatments quite water resistant as I tried over wet and muddy trails. Each time they get dirty that way I just wipe them off with a wet cloth, let them dry, brush them and then sometimes put some conditioner back on them. They have become quite soft and supple in the last 18 to 20 months but not collapsed. In some boots as the leather breaks in and softens the shaft starts to collapse which can look quite nice but in this case it has resisted creasing both at the ankle as well as at the vent. Part of that may be due to the thickness of the leather at about three and a bit millimeters thick that's without any lining and then talking about the lining the leather lining at the vamp also has softened. I feel more so than in any of my other Truman boots. I have a couple of pairs way older than these and I still feel a little ridge at the edge of the lining around the sides of the vamp. That sensation is completely gone on these. Everything about it has stood up to the mild abuse I've put them through. All the stitches are still pretty good. The three-quarter storm well looks as fresh as when new and the soles which are Vibram have worn better than on some of my other Vibram mini lug boots. The corner of the heels is showing somewhere and the stitching on the sole and at the toe especially and the sides they're showing somewhere. Mind you a lot of the light wear characteristics that you see maybe because of my use of them mainly on unpaved tracks on softer sand on earth and mud. There have been some gravel and rock strewn trails mixed in there but certainly not on concrete. The leather laces they come with has stood up as well. They've gotten soaked at times but I all I do is dry them up run some conditioners through them and they've come out really well. The bright brass hardware has been great no tarnishing whatsoever and the speed hooks more like solid brass posts and just hooks have worn better under the conditions than most other speed hooks. For some reason these are the most comfortable Truman boots I own with maybe the smoke rambler coming second. Check out my review of the smoke rambler up here. I wear these in size 8 as are all my Truman boots when my Brannock size is usually a US 8 and a half and that's my true to size. So that old thing about taking a half size down is correct in Truman's at least India 79 last for me. I find the last is snug in the heel and the waist and wide at the ball of the feet and then it snugs back in at the toe box. There's not a lot of volume a lot of volume in the quarters on my feet at least so the instep itself is quite snug and the use of these kilties it's more for looks than to snug them up. In fact I'm probably no comfortable without the kilties but they look kind of wicked though don't they. Length wise there's a little less than the usual half inch space at the toe box but not at all feeling short or tight. I think that might be because of the way of the rounding of the vamp area into an almond toe. I like this fit for hiking but not so much for working in. I find in work boots I like a roomier toe box so that when you kneel or twist in turn or while standing on the ladder on top of a narrow cabinet your toes can move and kind of get a grip. For hiking though you want your feet firmly snugged up especially in thick socks so that you're getting perches on the track and not twisting about which could sprain an ankle. The sole construction is still pretty stiff. I do think that they're as broken in as they're going to be and I kind of like them this way. They flex enough to have reduced any pre-break-in heel slip and the stiffness does help stability on rough terrain. So in summary if you haven't picked it up in my voice I do like these. I picked them up in a Truman seconds and sample sale and since I've never seen them offered again I'm thinking there were samples that were made to test the design and the leather. I'm really not sure why they didn't do a run of them because if it was an experiment a sample test it's a pretty successful experiment in my view. These were $374 or about $100 of regular built order price and being new and not being seconds to me they were a really good pickup in my opinion. My little run of over a hundred wares and maybe I don't know 800 kilometers of hiking proves their metal I think and I would buy them again. Well that's it. Like I said only a short update video so I hope you like it. You know what to do though right? Click on the like button so that the algorithm gods know to spread this around and if you're not a subscriber well correct that now and click on the subscribe button down there. What's coming up next that you might miss if you don't subscribe? Well I'll be looking at a brogue country boot from English historical boot maker Joseph Cheney. A red-wing boots comparison and a few more long-term wear reviews so if you don't want to miss out make sure that you do subscribe. So take care and until the next time see you again.