A Brief Rundown on How Wooden Clogs are Manufactured

Clogs today come in many varieties such as wooden clog sandals, clog boots and clog heels. But not many know about their background. Where did clogs come from? How are they made?

Clogs that we know today are descendants of wooden clogs that were used by the French, Swedish and the Dutch at the beginning of the twentieth century. Initially used by agricultural workers to protect their feet from mud and injuries, they slowly evolved into style icons that are widely popular today.

The process of making clogs is mostly a standard one. Earlier made entirely by hand, clogs today are made using a mixture of hand and machine manufacturing processes. A short summary of the process is as follows:

• Wood from willow or poplar trees is trimmed into logs which are then fed into a saw to cut them into rectangular blocks. These blocks are then roughly cut into sizes of wooden clog sandals into which they will be made. The size changes depending on the type and size of the clog to be made.
• A machine called as shaper is used to further trim the outer side of the blocks into shoes. A vinyl shoe is used as the model shoe to shape the wood block into the desired shape. Electrical cutting tools cut the blocks into perfectly shaped shoes. They carve in opposite directions, resulting in both the right shoe and left shoe being carved simultaneously.
• A boring machine is then used to carve the interior. The machine carves from outside to inside, leaving a quarter inch of material for manual shaping.
• The next step includes fine-tuning the interior of the shoes, either manually or automatically using a precise cutting machine. Extra wood and sharp points are smoothened out to leave the interior extremely smooth.
•  Next step involves drying and curing of the shoes. Placing them out in the open or near a hot air furnace allows moisture in the wood to disappear, hardening the shoes.
• The final step is finishing of the shoes. Dried shoes are smoothened with sandpaper to make them ready to be worn. They can be then decorated and varnished if necessary.