project – Boots Vault

About one month ago I bought myself these used Adidas Predator Precision Sg in the sought after “Champions League” edition. I paid £50+shipping and I knew back then that these boots got some potential, although they looked quite beaten up. But it’s always fun with some small projects right?

The issues the boots had was:

The aluminium studs were totally broken
The white colour was faded
The silver colour from the stripes were faded
The soleplate was coming off in some parts

All these issues were fixed step by step. Every project starts with a good clean up!

Then the studs were replaced with new ones and the parts off the soleplate that were coming off I simply heated up the plastic and slowly pressed it back on place by using two-component glue. After this it was time for the paintjob. Luckly I found few years back a great local airbrush artist (maalinetti.com) in my home city who also does these kind of jobs.

The final result was perfect! This is how they turned up!

It’s always worth to restore old boots if possible!

This is how the boots looked when I bought them. I got them for a great price of my friend. Adidas Predator Mania is known as one of the best footballboots ever but they do have a quite common problem, cracks in the rubber stripes… As you can see in the picture above, the rubber syripes are cracked and even coming off.

So what I did was removed the rubber stripes all the way down to where the soleplate starts and leather ends. As you might know I done this before but last time I removed the stripes completelly, in this case the parts of the rubber stipes that goes under the boot was actually in good shape and that’s why I kept them!

The removing of stripes can be hard as in this case. Although the stripes were cracked they are really glued tight!

The next part was to order some leather. Then the difficult part is to get the correct shapes for the stripes. Once I got 3 correct shaped sample stripes then I started to cut the finale pieces.

Last step is to find a right glue that works for leather and then just glue the stripes in place!

Here’s a picture of the new stripes on my Manias, happy with the result!

Here’s my custome painted Nike Mercurial Vapor III Fg. I spray painted them few months ago and re-spray painted them yesterday, as the gold colour is very sensitive. The final result is great!

The original colour of these was the release colourway white with the yellow heel and a black Nike swoosh. My first plan was to keep the Nike swoosh visible by painting it white or silver. Once I got painting the gold base I decided to paint the whole boot gold because everyone recognize this boot by it’s shape not by the Nike logo 😉

Had to paint the original laces seperately to make sure they was painted all the way.

Really satisfied how they look today!

So as you might seen on my InstaGram post I’m gonna have another project! 😎

The boots that are gonna be my project is the legendery Adidas Predator Precision Sg “Champions League” edition! I bought them for £50 and although they look really beat-up I think there is some potential left in them!

So my plan is to fully restore them and then play my final season game in them!

Obviously I need to begin with fully cleaning them. After that I need to reglue the soleplate in thosw places where it’s sligthly coming off, like in the toe area. Then they need a good new paintjob! 👌🏻

I will also add new laces to them! Then the final step is to replace the studs with new ones. As the studs are really worn down, all the way to the screw mechanism, this means that basically the only way to get them off is to saw them in half and brake them.

I’m looking forward to restoring them and hopefully to play the last game in them!

Stay tuned!

Here’s next steps of my boot project!
I decided to use the Carbon soleplate from Nike Mercurial Vapor 4 SL and attach it to Nike Vapor I!
Will soon start the placing and gluing the soleplate.
Stay tuned👌