For my first pair, I glued the linings to the uppers, and then stitched them together to reinforce at the collar and facings, and to close the uppers at the quarter/vamp seam. This created a fully laminated leather upper.
But after watching a lot of videos, I notice that many makers do not glue the lining to the uppers, and only attach them at the collar and the lace facings, and at the insole during lasting.
I’m curious what the pros and cons might be for each technique.
Where you laminate lining to upper before lasting, you don’t risk bubbles or wrinkles between them in the finished work. That’s assuming you size the lining pieces slightly smaller than the upper pieces through any curves, like around back of the leg in the shaft of a boot. Lining has to cover a shorter distance around the inside of a curves than the upper does on the outside, offset by the thickness of the lining. Mrsan calls this the “orange-peel effect” in one of his books.
On the downside, you can no longer last the lining and upper independently, to tackle more complex curves or allow for the different stretch of the materials. This isn’t a problem for relatively flat parts of the upper far from the featherline, like facings or the parts of boot shaft quarters around the ankles. It’s a problem around toes, heels, and sharply sculpted waists.
Hand makers do tend to laminate these parts, too. They just do it during the lasting process, rather than before. They use adhesives with longer working times that don’t bond on contact, like wheat paste or PVA.
For toes, it’s common to last the lining, then prelast the upper, then peel back the lining and paste on a stiffener. Another layer of paste goes onto the stiffener before the vamp gets flipped back down and finally lasted. For heels, apply paste and insert a stiffener between the layers before lasting, draft and check alignment, then immediately last the seat, while the paste remains wet and slides freely. You still end up with a lamination, it’s just three layers instead of two.
Now that I look back at my notes, only the quarters, heel-stay, and heel were laminated before lasting. but they were laminated after closing, so the curvature of the heel and shaft would already be established before the lamination. The vamp was left unglued until the lining was lasted and the toe puff glued on.
I also wonder if that layer of glue interferes with breathability.
Hirschkleber claims that their paste forms microcracks that make it breathable.
yeah, but it’s about 10x the cost of white school glue. Is it worth it?
$50 a jar for what appears to be a simple starch glue seems overpriced to me. And it dissolves in water, so I’d have concerns about durability.
If the microcrack claim is true then I am sure it is true for the other cheaper pastes on the market. I don’t really know why Hirschkleber is so overpriced in the US. In Germany it is $16 and in Japan it is $20. I personally can’t tell a difference between Hirschkleber and Nori paste performance. I haven’t had issues with water with either paste either. I guess maybe you lose the stiffness if it is completely filled with water but I have never tried it.