A Manual of Shoemaking and Leather and Rubber Products

by William H. Dooley

In the disposition of offal, heads are used for taps, top lifts, and under lifts. Shoulders are used for outsoles and inner soles, while bellies are used for medium to heavy taps and counters. Lightweight bellies and shanks are utilized for making box toes and counters.

Shanks are also used for taps and under lifts. This stock is solid and substantial and well suited for these purposes. The bellies, being flexible, are the best part of the hide obtainable for inner soles.

In cutting out soles, the manufacturer accumulates a considerable quantity of solid or center pieces, which are used for small top lifts, also for “Cuban” tops, thereby using up the bulk of the small heavy scrap that ordinarily would be sold for pieced heeling. There is also a demand for similar stock from the hardware trade, where it is used for making mallet and tool handles, also for wagon and carriage washers. Large quantities of men’s and women’s heeling and half heeling go to England, where it is cut up by heel manufacturers into lifts and sectional lifts for the English trade; there being a shortage of this class of offal there.

The shoe manufacturer, after cutting his soles and taps, is obliged to skive them to get the particular iron he needs. This leaves what is known as a “flesh sole shape,” also a “tap shape.” These skivings are pasted together by another class of trade and again used for inner soling and taps in the cheaper grades of shoes. Smaller skivings, or waste, after sorting out the sole and tap shapes, are sold to the leather board trade. This eventually comes back to the shoe trade in the shape of leather board and is cut into heel lifts. The waste after cutting heel lifts is again resold to the leather board trade and makes another round trip to the shoe manufacturer. This illustration, as well as many others in the leather remnant business, demonstrates the scientific principle that nothing is ever entirely lost. In regard to pieced heel lifts, these are made in either two, three, or four sections. This refers to what are known as sectional heel lifts. Scrap leather is also used for shanking for the European trade.

Soles and taps, known as rejects, that is, those thrown out by the high-grade trade, are sold to manufacturers of cheaper lines. A shoe manufacturer cutting his own soles and buying sole leather in sides, after sorting out the soles suited to his own requirements, will sell what he cannot use to remnant dealers, who in turn re-sell them to shoe manufacturers requiring that particular class of stock. The scrap leather, or remnant dealer, thus forms a useful link in the chain of distribution, furnishing a market where shoe and leather manufacturers may dispose of their surplus products to best advantage, and providing a source of supply for buyers who wish any particular article to suit their individual needs.

Upper or dressed leather is made from kips or large calfskins. It is tanned and finished like all other forms of leather by variations of the foregoing process. Thick hides are often split thin by machinery, and the parts retained and finished separately. The parts of the leather from the hair side are most valuable and are called “grain” leather; the inner parts or “flesh splits” are made into a variety of different kinds of leather by waxing, oiling, and polishing.

It is finished by scouring with brushes and then rubbed with a piece of glass, which removes creases and wrinkles and stretches the leather. Then it is stuffed with a mixture of oil, soap, and tallow, which is worked into it by rolling. Various finishes are given to leather, such as seal grain, buff, glove grain, oil grain, satin calf, russet, plain shoe, etc.

Upper leathers are blacked by rubbing with a mixture of lampblack and oil or tallow, or with a solution of copperas and logwood.

No tanning process, no matter how good or thorough, can make firm, serviceable, wear-resisting leather out of all portions of any hide, because nature made some parts of every hide porous, spongy, and lacking in fibrous strength.

Calfskins used by tanners are of several classes. American calfskins, taken off in the United States and Canada, are usually sold green pelted. Farmers raise only a small fraction of the calves born. Each cow must produce a calf in order to insure a maximum flow of milk. Most of the farmers keep cows to produce milk, hence they sell the young calves for veal and use their skins for high-grade calf leather.