I bought one of those stealth rubber climbing shoe repair kits, which basically have a large supply of finely ground stealth rubber, and far too little barge cement.

Recently I used the sticky rubber powder, and mixed it with urethane glue, to put on top of urethane-glue repairs. It seems really strong, and has shown no signs of breaking on repairs. The urethane-sticky rubber mix is definitely more grippy than pure urethane. I've used this on approach shoes, to replace lugs or repair the instep.

I have lots of marginal shoes with worn-down sticky-rubber soles.

I wonder if I might grind the soles to provide a similar sticky-rubber powder for repairs? Any ideas for the best way to accomplish said grinding?

Are you using Aquaseal or Seam Grip as the urethane glue? I bought a Stealth kit to fill in some wear spots on the rands of climbing shoes, but the default cement peeled off very quickly. I can't claim to be a satisfied customer of the kit. Urethane + ground rubber sounds like a better option.

I'd guess that a food grater/rasp, like you might use for nutmeg or Parmesan cheese, would work well for making ground sticky rubber.

That might do -- I have rasps for woodworking. I'll try one on a defunct shoe.

I'm using seamgrip.

Let me know how it works out. Now that you've made me curious I may experiment on the soles of an old pair of shoes myself with some rasps and a Dremel tool and see if I can produce rubber powder, and if so will pass it on...

Im considering smearing some of that on my old birkenstocks. Those things are slicker`n snot after 12 years. You guys ever put climbing rubber on anything other than rock shoes?

pvnisher wrote:Im considering smearing some of that on my old birkenstocks. Those things are slicker`n snot after 12 years. You guys ever put climbing rubber on anything other than rock shoes?

I actually got the stealth kit to coat the tips of gloves. I'm used to having my fingers uncovered, and there was one section of low class 5 rock friction slab on the way to a summit. The day for the climb was predicted to be windy with a high of 25F.

So I bought a pair of insulated worker gloves, that were a little tight, and coated the palm-side fingertips with the barge-sticky rubber mix. That one time, they were excellent -- far grippier than my skin, even in warmer weather.

I'm now rebuilding some trail-running and approach shoes with the urethane-sticky rubber mix. I start out the repair with pure urethane, and gradually increase the proportion of sticky rubber as I move out. We'll see how it works.

Trail-ran a rough 6.5 miles in the repaired shoes -- the soles held up, no signs of coming apart. The last coat had a lot of sticky rubber mixed in, and probably wasn't mixed well, so the sole eroded a bit there. I built up close to 0.5" in one place, and that shows no sign of coming loose. Update: added another 8 miles -- no signs of patch coming loose.