How do steel toe boots work? Many people in the Portland area are concerned about some myths about steel-toed boots. Let's see if I can clarify the four main concerns as follows:
How do steel toe boots work?
1. Steel Toes amputate toes on impact - this problem was tested on episode 42 of the MythBusters
TV show. I've attached a copy of MythBusters' written findings below.
The bottom line is that if you're working in an environment with heavy materials, parts or hand trucks, forklifts, and other items, you'll be better off with it than without.
2. Steel-toed boots bother my toes: The production of steel-toed shoes has changed a lot over the past 20 years. Back in the day, there weren't many options for a steel toe cap, steel toe caps were bought from one or two sellers and were indeed narrow.
Today we have many options with wider and higher steel toecaps, and many of the brands create their own steel toecaps for a better and more comfortable fit. The key is to make sure you get a good fit for a steel toe boot.
3. Steel-toed boots are too heavy – It's a fact that steel-toed boots add weight to footwear, but it's minimal and it's not the only reason they tend to weigh more.
Most, if not all, steel-toed shoes are designed and manufactured as industrial-grade boots with thicker, better-quality leather, midsole materials, and outsole materials designed for long life in the workplace. There are now other material options for the toe cap, such as alloy and composite, which reduce the weight slightly.
4. Steel toe boots are out of fashion: times are changing, now we have a lot of very stylish steel toe boots and shoes. They're not what Grandpa used to wear...steel-toed hiking boots, trail shoes and trainers are now available.
These are usually lighter in weight than standard work shoes and generally offer more cushioning and are much like standard hiking, trail, or running shoes.
Hope this information helps! Regards, Victor
MythBusters Episode 42: Steel Toe Amputation, Bottle Rocket Blast Off
- You can launch someone 30-40ft with a bottle-rocket-powered backpack: myth busted (the engineering on this one was a bit questionable)
- Steel toe boots have a higher amputation risk than regular boots: myth busted
Steel Cap Amputation
Myth: Steel-toed boots are more dangerous than regular boots — if something falls on the boots, the steel can curl in and cut off your toes.
They were able to find one occurrence of amputation while wearing steel-toed boots occurring in real life. In 2002, an Australian worker lost his 3rd toe when some steel pipes fell from a forklift.
Adam and Jamie constructed various tests for this myth using both a guillotine toe-smasher and an arbor-press. Initially, they used frangible feet that Adam made, but it turned out that they made a mistake in assuming that their frangible feet would model real human feet being crushed. For better comparisons, they ended up using clay.
Frangible Feet Construction
Adam constructed frangible feet to test based on landmine frangible feet. After testing chicken legs, bamboo, and fiberglass as substitutes for human bones, he decided to use fiberglass bones. The bones were set in a ballistics gel cast of Adam’s leg.
For those wondering, the full frangible leg construction process was:
- Pour dental alginate over the leg and surround it with plaster bandages to get leg mold. (link to the website on making plaster casting with dental alginate)
- Fill alginate mold with silicon-based rubber to make a rubber leg
- Make a plaster mold of a rubber leg
- Make a plaster mold of a skeletal foot
- Fill the mold with a hard resin fiberglass cocktail to make bones
- Use a hot glue gun to make tendons to connect bones
- Place resin bones inside plaster leg mold and fill with ballistics gel mix (used a different ballistics gel mix than usual)
Guillotine Drop test 1
NOTE:it turned out that the results from this test were somewhat invalid. After testing with the steel-toed boots they tested with the regular boots and discovered that the ballistics gel was too springy and was invalidating their results. While ballistics gel is good for simulating bullet impacts on flesh, it’s not so good for testing crushing.
Setup:
- Guillotine-style toe crusher that drops a flag metal bar onto the toe of a boot beneath.
- Used the highest-rated (ANSI-75) steel toe boots.
Results:
- 75lbs from 3 feet (official ANSI test height and weight): mashed the leather down a bit, but nothing injurious.
- 400lbs from 3 ft: more deformation in the steel plate, but the only damage to the frangible foot was a broken metatarsal (big toe). Adam: “I want to see some toes cut off or crushed beyond all recognition”
- 400lbs from 6 ft: a lot of pancaking of steel cap and lots of broken bones beneath, but no toe amputation.
They didn’t detail the results from the regular boot because of their discovery about the ballistics gel being too springy.
Guillotine drop on boots filled with clay
Because of the ballistics gel problem, they decided to use clay instead of the frangible bone legs they had constructed. Clay is the method ANSI uses to test boots.
At the official test height of 3ft with 75lbs, there was 0.5″ of clay compression with the steel-toe boot, which is exactly to spec. The regular boot failed horribly, with the clay being completely splattered.
Arbor press test to find the total failure point
They used an arbor press to squish boots to their total failure point. The steel-toe boot was able to take 6000lbs of pressure before total failure; the regular boot was only able to take about 1200lbs, which was hard to measure as it failed so quickly.
Shearing attachment tests
In order to test a worst-case scenario, they made a shearing attachment, which was a thin metal plate that would hit the boot on the edge.
They mounted the shearing attachment to the arbor press: at 750 lbs it broke every bone in the
They then mounted the shearing attachment on the guillotine and raised it to its max height of 6ft and max weight of 400lbs.
The blade glanced off the steel plate, shearing the entire shoe in half. They tested again and got the same result.
In this particular scenario, were a heavy blade to drop on your foot you could actually lose more of your foot as the steel cap could direct the glade further up the foot as it did in the test. This isn’t the failure mode described in the tests, though, and regardless of what type of boot you used there would be amputation.
Mythbusted: They had to mount a blade in order to get amputation with the steel toe boot and all their other tests showed much more damage to the foot when regular boots are used.