It's one thing if you're willing to pay the extra $100 for the cap toe and warranty and you recognize you're paying extra for those features and don't mind, making the conscious choice to pay extra for details happens all the time, but to use the katahdin as a baseline recommendation to anyone (at its current price), the warranty is not worth the cost of another pair of those boots (I have plenty of stuff from LL Bean and it's great but one of the pros of LL Bean is the stuff is generally priced well, it's just the warranty is a nice hunk of icing on the cake), and if it is, you're probably abusing the policy. I think in a lot of the recurring threads people do recommend the gq's over katahdin's (this is how I was originally swayed to not get the katahdin's about 10 months ago), but in the threads on mfa that crop up every few weeks 'what pair of boots should I get?', people keep insisting on katahdin's. To kind of add onto this thought, I don't know why people keep recommending the Katahdin's over the typical gq apache's (the new cordovan colored ones look to be a different story but these have the same leather I'm pretty damn sure) you can get off amazon for $80 - 100 regularly. But if I could do it all over I would just spend the extra money and get Iron Rangersīut if I could do it all over I would just spend the extra money and get Iron Rangers All and all I'm very happy with my boots, they were cheap, they're pretty comfortable and well made. I'm doing this review for others to search in the future. I wear my boots regularly, to work and out, I never clean them, I like my boots to have a lot of character.

Here they are today after 1 year, 2 winters, one in Chicago, one in NYC. The sno seal, although it served its purpose beautifully, took away all depth of color to the leather, they now looked like a dull wet brown paper bag. I looked for advice here on mfa, and everyone in the comments section was just like, 'wear them.'Ī couple months later I bought some leather laces for them.Ī few months after that, with winter approaching I bought some sno seal and put on a couple coats, which I immediately regretted. I wanted them to be old and worn out and broken in already. When I first bought them they looked like this, and I kind of hated them for it.

They were broke in and beautiful, I google mapped where my nearest LL Bean was an ran out and bought a pair, I think I picked them up for less than $200. Some dude with worn out Katahdins looking for advice on repair. I first noticed them here in a post that I've since been unable to find.

My first 'big' purchase was a pair of LL Bean Katahdin Iron Works Engineer Boots. I'm cheap and lazy, so I probably haven't made as much progress as a lot of people I've seen in this sub. I started visiting /r/malefashionadvice a couple of years ago.

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