 G'day people, how are you going? Today I'm revealing a bit of American boot history. The Chippewa 6-inch service boot in crazy horse leather. These are now starting to be hard to find. This is the Chippewa 6-inch service boot. Unlike many of you, I came on quality American footwear late in the day. In fact, only when the pandemic started and after I bought a pair of Thursday captain boots. I've always had boots in my regular and reasonable rotation of footwear. Primarily Timberland classic yellow boots and RM Williams Chelsea boots, especially being Australian at all. So I've always liked boots, particularly the military aspect of service boots, which is what originally drew me to Thursday captains. Once I bought them, I started researching and looking at classic American style service boots and work boots. So of course, I stumbled on Red Wing, Wolverine, Tharagud and Chippewa. Tharagud and Chippewa were in my price range at that time. So my foray into quality made boot wool started with those two brands before it grew into my 55 plus pairs today. Now this Chippewa service boot is in a leather that they call Crazy Horse. It was also made in different suede and new bucks. A black oily leather called Black Odessa, a couple in various browns and tans, and a chrome excel version they called Cordoven, referring to the color rather than to shell Cordoven. It's a pretty classic service boot design, a plain round toe, six inches high from the block heel to the top of the shaft, laced up with the open derby style quarters. It has quite a rounded toe from the top looking down and from the side it shows relatively high sidewalls in the vamp and the toe box without looking either blocky or bulbous like an iron ranger. It looks like it has room in the toes without being like clown shoes. In fact, the tip of the boot, the toe box shape is reminiscent to me of the shape of the Wolverine 1000 mile boot rounded the tip down to a relatively high sidewall. In this crazy horse leather it looks rugged and like a fairly historic military heritage style and quite outdoorsy. Actually, I rarely wear this when I'm at home in town and I usually wear them when I'm visiting my clients in the Kimberley region in the northwest of Western Australia or in the top end of the Northern Territory on very sandy muddy savanna or tropical terrain. So I'm usually wearing them with jeans and khaki chinos or five pocket pants, t-shirts or polo shirts or short sleeve button down shirts or with long sleeve work or cotton bush and outdoor shirts. I think they're capable of being work boots despite being made more fashion focused so I can't see any reason why you wouldn't wear them with your work pants and canvas ducks too. They're not safety boots though so bear that in mind. In this leather, I wouldn't wear them beyond casual probably not even smart casual. I think you'd get away with them only in very casual situations and relaxed social gatherings. You know who makes them because there's a pretty prominent Chippewa logo on the ankle. Some people don't like that but I do. Chippewa was founded in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin in the United States in 1901 and presumably it was named after the town. It was bought out by Justin Brands in 1984 and Justin Brands itself was then bought out by Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's acquisitions and holding investment company. Justin Brands also make Justin boots, Tony Lama boots and Nocona boots. I think they're all now pretty much brands of the one company rather than independent corporate subsidiaries. Chippewa's about page on their website says that they were built to honor the guts and determination engineers who paved the way in America. They now make work and outdoor footwear in lace up and pull up styles that are a mixture of old style leather loggers and modern padded work boots. Some of them are made in America, some are not but I can't find what proportions are and what are not. They reputedly have an original Chippewa range which these belong to but their website at the time of filming doesn't even list them. When you click on the heritage link all you get is their about page which is all about the heritage. If you click on footwear and six inch lace up you get their regular modern work boots. When you click on the picture on the homepage that should lead you to the original Chippewa collection line you get an error message. The page you're looking for does not exist. So they seem to have been discontinued whether temporarily due to COVID or permanently I'm not sure. The only places you can get them still consistently is on Amazon and some big footwear consolidated shoe stores in the US, but more on that later. I think we might jump straight into their construction. I'll start from the bottom up. The outsole is a rubber composite outsole from Vibram. Vibram is an Italian sole manufacturing company founded by a gentleman called Vitale Bramani hence V-Bram and not Vibram. Viva Vitale, Bram for Bramani. Mr Bramani was a 1930s mountaineer in the Italian Alpine Club and he invented his rubber composite soles in 1935 after six of his friends died on a mountain climbing expedition. Boots used at the time provided very little insulation and traction and he felt that he had to do better in memory of his friends. His first Vibram sole was very similar to today's Commando soles with deep lugs radiating at the outside edge of the foot and then star-shaped lugs in the centre of the heel and ball of the foot. This so-called caramato sole was used by a team that climbed K2 and launched specialised shoes for each stage of the expedition from trekking to high altitude climbing. Today Vibram manufactures some specialist shoes but still make a stunning array of outsole in Brazil, China, Italy, the Czech Republic and the USA. Some popular styles are variations of the Commando pattern as well as their Christy blown rubber wedge sole and this one, the Vibram outsole. I think the modern number is 700 but don't quote me. I'll put a link in the description below to a Heddles page describing some of the more popular Vibram soles. The outsole is attached to the uppers using a form of construction called Goodyear welting. A strip of material, usually leather and caught the welt is first sewn to the uppers on the inside of the uppers and then sewn onto the outside of the sole construction resulting in this stitch that you can see on the ledge that is the welt and on the bottom of the sole itself. In this case it's a 360 degree welt. Some boots only go through 270 degrees from one side of the heel to the other and also in this case it goes through the outsole and the cork midsole. The advantage of a Goodyear welt construction is that it is re-soleable and can be recrafted when the sole wears out. Unlike a cement construction shoe, once this sole wears out you can cut the stitches and peel off this outsole, replace it and sew a new one to the welt without damaging or even touching the uppers. Another advantage is that it is more water resistant than if you just stitch the soles directly to the uppers with the thread holes passing through everything. If you do that there's no welt as a water barrier to the inside. These chippable boots do have a steel shank embedded in the midsole. A shank through the gap between the heel and the ball of the foot provides arch support and for torsional stability for rough ground or going up ladders. Inside is a leather insole and a leather heel pad for some shock softening on the heel strike. The heel counter to give the heel shape and stability is on the inside and covered by a leather piece inside. Staying inside, this boot is not lined except in the vamp and the toe box by a canvas duck material. This seems to have been the lining material of choice in less expensive heritage boots. You see it in red wings and in the thoroughgood mock toes. I honestly don't know that canvas is that durable but common sense would say it's not as durable as a leather lining. The uppers are in this crazy horse leather. Crazy horse does not come from a horse. It's cow leather and it's so called because they used it to make saddles and horse livery. I don't now know which tannery producer's chippable was leather but you make a crazy horse by taking a full grain leather hide in this case slightly corrected or sanded to remove hair holes and wrinkles and then you apply a wax formula to end up with a softened but strong leather because the fibres are strengthened by the wax put in it. It doesn't feel waxy but it does feel matte and slightly nappy like newbuck. The crazy horse gives this boot a rugged and old style look and small scratches, scuffs and natural colour variation as you rub it is the highlight of the wear and its patina. It's a pretty tough leather and it withstands knocks and scrapes pretty well. The wax treatment also helps with water resistance of course. The toe box is lightly structured just at the sides of it and not at the top, the top feels soft. There's a double and triple stitching where it counts at the quarters and at the heel and at the backstay strip up the back. There are seven brass eyelets to lace up, no speed hooks. The unlined tongue made of the same crazy horse leather is partly gusseted up to the fourth eyelet which helps with water resistance and with keeping the tongue from slipping. They come with flat waxed cotton laces but on one trip to our topical north the laces got soaked in mud and became stiff so I swapped them over for leather laces which I think look better anyway. The edge of the lace facings is raw edged but the top of the collar is rolled and stitched to a nice finish. QC or quality control is OK, not fantastic. Nothing's fallen off but there's been loose stitching threads that have sort of come up like they weren't finished properly. I've done the usual burn and melt with a match. Since the leather is a wax impregnated leather you'd think conditioning with a waxy cream is the go. In fact, Chippewa recommends an Apache cream like Bickmore's Apache cream which I'll put a link to below. Apache cream is very similar to Venetian shoe cream but VSC is a little more waxy in my opinion and I didn't want to use it on this leather because I was worried it would turn the surface into more of a smooth feel than this new but like feel. I've used RM Williams leather dressing on these. To me they feel like RM Williams' Kip Leathers which take that saddle dressing really well. I usually, as I said, wear them in the north and northwest of Australia where the terrain is sandy or reddish black sore mud that clings to everything. I've dug a stuck vehicle out of the mud wearing these boots so they have got plenty dirty. I cleaned them by basically hosing them down and then saddle-soaping them before I let them dry and applying that RM Williams saddle dressing to replenish the moisture. They take a bashing really well so I don't really need a lot of care I don't think but like all boots the most important thing I find is to keep them clean of sand and dust that could wear into the leather over time and cause cuts and cracks especially if they dry out. I take these boots in a US size 8D. US sizing is one number up from UK or Australian sizing numbers. There's no complicated formula. All it is is that whenever someone first started to apply the definitions of sizes the UK people said okay this particular size is say 7 but the Americans said nah we'll call that size an 8. A bit arbitrary I know but that's all there is to it. The only thing is you have to be careful whether the shoe manufacturer tells you they run a bit large or if they run true to size. My true to size as measured on the aluminium device that you stand on in a shoe store that's called a Brannock device is a US 8.5 in an average D width. So like all American heritage boots that run large I took a half size down to an 8D and it fitted perfectly. The last is a generous round at last so I didn't feel any squeeze but the corners of the quarters are stitched just where the knuckles of my pinky toes are and I did have to break in that part of the boot because they're cut into the top of the bone there. I put a lot of RM Williams saddle dressing as a conditioner on the inside of the boot at that point and then for three or four evenings while I was watching TV I pushed in the ball of a ball pin hammer and I massaged that area from the inside out stretching it enough so that now after one and a half years where they just fit the shape of my feet and are super comfy. Or at least they're super comfy with the addition of a thin removable foam insole. The inside of the boot is pretty basic and this hard rubber Vibram V bar sole is quite hard with nothing shock absorbing in between. I mean it's a pretty basic boot. The thin piece of foam just cushions it enough. I bought this pair in January 2020 from Amazon. Chippewa's website did show the boot listed but I chose Amazon because of the free postage and free returns as an Amazon Prime member. Living outside the US, shipping can be long and expensive especially if it didn't fit and had to be sent back. I bought it for Australian $300 then and while it seems to be no longer available from Chippewa's website, it's still available from Amazon from US 100 to 280 depending on size and leather. I'll put a link to the Amazon page below but it does seem to go back and forth on availability of sizes and colors. Look this is a basic boot. If you compare it with my Thursday captains at Australian $370 also from Amazon so from that you can tell it's an entry level boot. My Thurigut Mokto work boots that I bought around that same time were also bought about the same price and today you can compare it with, say, Helm boots also around that price. It's no frills and if you buy it, you buy it for that classic rugged look and there's an entry level boot to kick around and enjoy the history of the boot. Unlike something like a car where you can't get spare parts when the model goes out of production, Vibram still make this sole and anyway you can always re-sole or re-craft this with any other outsole that you like so it should last you many years. In terms of value, sure you get what you pay for but what you get for what you pay here is pretty comparable to all those boots at that same price level and with more history behind it to wear with some distinction. So there you have it. The Chippewa 6 inch service boot in crazy horse leather. I hope you liked this review. Someone asked me in a Facebook group why do I review boots you can't buy anymore? Well, I'm not a commercial reviewer. I'm not a commercial reviewer trying to get you to buy boots so I review boots that are hard to get as in this case or that have finished in a particular makeup like some limited batch runs by small batch manufacturers. I do it for my own love of the boots and to celebrate them and as a record of what they're like just in case you find a pair or they are revived or you find a love pair on eBay or something. If you love boots then it's not about watching me review something that you want to buy but just to know about boots and the different boots at that. Anyway, if you like the review I'd love it if you click on the like button. If you haven't already why don't you click on the subscribe as well. I have a ton of other boot reviews and unboxings to bring to you so don't miss them. Until then, take care and I'll see you soon.