Cleaning Fabric Walking Boots
If you’ve just spent a significant amount of money on state of the art, technologically advanced fabric walking boots, you probably won’t shirk on the responsibility to keep them clean, with a view to prolonging their life and maintaining their usefulness. Cleaning should enable you to use your boots for years to come, and while footwear might look most attractive when it’s new, becoming dirty is really the purpose of walking boots.
Deep Cleaning
After a long walk, boots are likely to be muddy. Allowing mud to remain on fabric and seep through to the interior encourages acid that’s present in soil to eat away at man made fibres. For boots that are extremely dirty, copious amounts of water is usually the answer. A hose or a simple garden tap can rinse away most of the dirt that’s accumulated on your boots during your walk. To aid the rinsing process, an old toothbrush is one of the best tools at your disposal. A combination or scrubbing and rinsing will visibly remove most dirt and grime from the surface of fabrics and from cavities. Before rinsing it’s wise to shake walking boots to free any grid that might have accumulated in creases.
Regular Maintenance
Sweat can cause walking boots to smell, and it can also damage fabrics through the acids it contains. Regardless of surface dirt, it’s a good idea to rinse boots every couple of months to cleanse them of sweat and its effects. This will keep them fresh and ultimately make them last longer. All walkers know that setting out on a walk with clean boots is more pleasant than the remembrance that you’ve been lax in performing your duties where cleaning is concerned.
Drying Precautions
It’s important always to allow walking boots to dry naturally, whether they’re wet as a result of outdoor use or cleaning. Naturally means not to use artificial sources of heat to hasten the process, and especially to avoid appliances that might dry them rapidly but cause irreparable cracking or damage to sophisticated man made materials. Not only that, but glues can melt when exposed to high temperatures. Newspaper is a good material to use for absorbing excess water when washing boots. Newspaper can be rolled into balls and placed inside boots to effectively hasten the drying process, but it needs to be replaced when it’s saturated to avoid it turning to pulp.
When it comes to boots, insoles are best cleaned separately. Laces should be loosened or temporarily removed, and the tongue moved forward to maximise the flow of water for washing and air for drying. Cleaning presents a very good opportunity to check for damage and undertake repairs, or to apply waterproofing.