restoration help

How is it going community , I was going through my old storage and came upon some grails. OG Varsity Red 6s. Problem is, they are beat. Can anybody help me with a couple restorations

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Before you do anything check this thread Blazers made

http://niketalk.com/t/15471/official-sneaker-care-maintenance-post-its-back

There are few things you can do to get it look better but surely they arent going to look like new.

I am not a restoring specialist so check tutorials first.

Check first

First thing to do is to check whether the shoe is still wearable (if you wanna wear it), polyurethane sole is known to crumble if it aint worn for years or just old, and when you have OG, 9/10 its unwearable. If you are restoring the shoe to wear it, that will tell you if the effort is worth it.

Press hard with your finger where the arrows are pointing and see whether the midsole/paint cracks when you press. If anything cracks then you wont be able to wear them much because they are going to fall apart.

Restoration

There are tons of videos on youtube showing how to restore midsoles, leather uppers, nubuck uppers and that kind of stuff.

At the bottom of this post I made a list of youtube users you might want to check out and see how they have been doing things and what the end result was.

For the midsole you would need to strip the paint first first and then re-paint it using Angelus paint or similar kind of paint, just remember that it needs to be specifically this kind of paint in order to attach to the polyeurethane and last a bit. You can get the paint from angelusdirect (google it), and it should be able to do the job on the midsole and leather parts.

Icy soles

The yellow sole is the result of the icy rubber reacting with oxygen, the sole itself gets oxydised and the results is nasty yellow colour.

In order to get the midsoles less piss-yellow and more icy you can use two methods (there are a lot of tutorials for this on youtube too):

- Sauce - mixture of hydrogen peroxide from colour developer (hair care product when you want to dye your hair) and OxyClean. This method is fairly safe for your sole and everything around, its just little time consuming and requires mutliple applications. The more peroxide in the solution, the faster the process. You want this thing only on your sole, not on your upper as it can damage it. The method requires warm temperatures and some sunlight (UV) for the de-oxydation process. The end result is an icy clear sole, if the yellowing is deep then some yellow will stay.

- Sea Glow by Island Girl - This stuff is little nasty but it does the job well, the end result will give you more of a blue-ish icy. Once you prepared everything, soak up the spinge and start scrubbing the icy sole with the sponge (that has sea glow on it) and leave it be somewhere where UV is present, it could be either outside or nect to a UV lamp. The end result is a icy-blue sole if done enough times.

These were the basics of how to icy your soles and to do everything correctly you need to go and watch some tutorials on youtube to get the idea better.

Remember that any of these processes can damage your upper if any solution gets on it.

The most important fact is that your soles can detatch if the midsole is getting to hot in the sunlight so watch what youre doing. The more UV, the faster the reaction.

Pull tab

Trick I saw with a jeans decolourised pull tab at the back is either wipe it with a cloth that has some isopropyl alcohol (cleaning alcohol) on it or to use a pencil eraser (make sure its soft and smooth) and rub it.

Upper

There is no way to repair durabuck, suede or other type of special leathers once they have been cracked, torn, scratched, scuffed. So other then dusting off the leather, youre pretty much set.

Other than everything else I said above, I think thats all you can do.

Here is a list of users you should check, they got a lot of good information in their videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Spotonrestorations

https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroSnickers

https://www.youtube.com/user/SneakerHeadInTheBay

https://www.youtube.com/user/restoremysneakers