 G'day. How are you going? Welcome to my channel about boots and boot-related things, and if you're new here, my name is Tech. I film on budget country and I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land. Today, I'm going to look at the six most popular outsole used on boots. So the first type of outsole I want to talk about is the leather outsole. The oldest form of outsole really, if you think about it, caveman probably slapped on a piece of leather over his foot and strapped him in with some leather fonds. So it's probably the oldest form of outsole in your footwear. So this is the Grant Stone diesel boot in Black Chrome XL with a double layer of leather and the outsole is leather. The pros and cons, the pros is that it's an extremely flexible piece of outsole material, which molds to your feet, is extremely comfortable, breathes quite well, and is quite flexible. In this case, I've got shoe trees, so I can't really flex it. The con is obvious. It's fairly ugly once it's scuffed, and it can be quite slippery, particularly on slippery surfaces like polished woods, ice, snow, that sort of thing. You can attempt to make it less slippery, such as in the case of this Oak Street bootmaker's trench boot, using butyl cork. Butyl is a form of compound that's infused into the leather, making it a little bit more oily and a little bit more sticky, so that in fact it's a leather sole, but it's quite sticky. So the biggest advantage of it is really in a dress boot, because as you can see, leather soles can be very flat in profile, quite sleek, quite elegant. The second type of popular outsole I want to discuss tries to maintain that flatness for sleepiness. You wouldn't call this Iron Ranger a dressy boot, but the idea is that workers in the turn of the century could wear these to work and then polish them up and go to church or whatever with them, and don't look as if they're walking around in great big clumpy boots. This is cork nitrile. The Olden Indies also use them. It's cork infused rubber, little chips of cork made into a rubber sole. As you can see, the pro is that it's sleek, it's quite lightweight, it's quite flexible. The con is that it can get quite slippery just like a leather sole, but you can imagine going to church with that. It's still quite sleek. You're not clumping around in commando boots. The third most popular outsole still tries to retain a flat look to it, so it looks quite sleek. So it can be versatile in the reasonably dressy, but they provide for better grip by putting in studs. This is rubber, of course, so this is the famous day night sole. As modern as it looks, it was invented in 1905, 1910 for the worker to go to work and be able to have a good grip. A proper day night sole, I think if you can just see, has these studs slightly raised and because they're in a little circle, they don't actually pick up dirt. They're reasonably comfortable and over the years has become quite widely copied, so Grant Stone, and in this case, Thursday, used their proprietary versions of it. In Thursday's case, they also include the day night smile at the bottom. Very grippy, light, flexible, reasonably dressy, and in my case, in urban wear, walking through grass maybe. I'm not sure it hiked through mountains in this, but in my use case scenario, very comfortable, very grippy. The next most popular outsole is crepe rubber. Crepe, not to be mixed up with the wedge soles that you find on wedge sole mock toe boots, which are sometimes called crepe, and I'll talk about that later. But crepe comes from the French word and it's rolled through a crepe pier. Sometimes it's called plantation rubber because it's exactly where it's made. Liquid rubber is taken from the trees, they're tapped, they're mixed with acids and other chemicals to harden them, and they're poured on thin tins in order to get tacky and harden, and then as they dry, they're rolled through a crepe pier just rollers to get thin slices through, and that's why you get this rather horrible molten sort of look to it. And basically, roll rubber. Most famous for clout's desert boots, and as you can see, they're just basically glued on. Very grippy, extremely grippy, they're light, they're comfortable, they're squishy to stand on, but oh my goodness, are they ugly? They really pick up all kinds of dirt, hair, you know, things you wouldn't want to talk about, and I'm going to wash my hands after this. So the next type of outsole is the wedge sole, used primarily in mock-toe boots, but they're starting to change, they're starting to be used in other boots because they are so damn comfortable. Now these are sometimes called crepe rubber, but they're not, they're blown rubber. It's rubber that's taken back to factories, reconstituted, have air blown through them so they're a bit squishy, and then they're congealed into sheets in a mould to create this sort of an effect. Highly, highly comfortable, very soft and squishy, great support because there's no gap between the ball of the foot and the heel, causing a bridge at the arch. It can be pretty grippy, particularly if you have these things cut into it, but they are soft and they do wear out quite quickly. And finally, out of the popular types of outsole is the commando lugged sole. You can always tell commando sole because of the pattern of the radiating lugs and these cross shaped lugs in the middle, even on the heel. This is made by Vibram and there is quite a tragic story behind this. Vitaly Bramani was a mountain climber in Europe and his friends died in a climbing accident and he'd always maintained that if they had proper footwear with good grip, they wouldn't have died, so he invented the commando sole. You see these almost everywhere now. This is a full commando sole. It radiates out to the edge and it's a full length. You also get them as a half lug commando sole, so there's a leather outsole and then on top of that they put a half lug of commando sole onto it, similar pattern as you can see, radiating out in the crosses, same on the heel. There is a variation on these deep lugs. I mean, you see them everywhere, don't you? Timberland, if you think about it. But there's a variation on these deep lugs called the ridgeway sole, made by the same people who make day night soles. And these are quite deep lugs, as you can see from the side, and yet in most angles you wouldn't even know they were there, except maybe the heel where it's cut in quite deep. But these wavy lugs are better in the sense that they don't pick up as much dirt and grit and bits of rock because they're wider, and yet they're still as grippy, very comfortable and fantastic traction. There you go. I hope you found that useful. I'm going to use this video to refer to in future, so that I don't keep repeating myself when I talk about outsole used in the boots that I review. Hey, don't forget to click on the like button below, and if you haven't already, click on subscribe as well. My video on the five best business casual boots in my collection is coming up next. You don't want to miss that. Until the next time though, stay well guys, and I'll see you soon.