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Hey gang,</p>
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I have a secondhand boot with Intution liners, where one liner has a large thin adhesive foam pad applied on it. It's the pad that looks sort of like a butterfly, and pads the back at your achilles and wraps around the malleolus bone at either side. I think this pad isn't helping me and would like to get it off, but it's stuck on pretty good, (ordinarily a good thing). How can I take it off without tearing up the liner? A solvent like alcohol? Heat? I am going to heat up and remold the liners anyway, so the glue may soften up, but I don't want to mess up the liner by ripping the pad off a heated, soft liner.</p>
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I did try searching the forum, but did not really find a discussion of this. BTW, these are Intuition wraps that came with Dalbello Krypton boots, although I doubt that matters.</p>
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You could try heat but I'm skeptical you'd soften the adhesive enough without overheating the foam. Personally I'd just attack it with an xacto blade. It doesn't have to be pretty inside your boot...
The butterfly pad is likely glued on with contact cement. If it was adhesive backed, you could easily pull it off by hand. Use a heat gun on low or a hair dryer to warm up just the butterfly. The contact cement will loosen up once it's warm.
So to partly answer myself, last night I was too lazy to find the heat gun and started applying alcohol (to the liner, not to myself, although that might have also helped). I put drops of rubbing alcohol at the pad edge and let them soak under the pad, then started working a thin metal tool under the pad - a spudger, that you use for prying open phone and computer cases. This started to loosen the pad, so I continued with the drops of alcohol at the seam as I pried up the pad. Eventually I got the whole thing off with no damage except stretching the outer fabric of the liner in a few places. The alcohol was effective in reducing the adhesion of the cement, but I'm sure heat would have also made it go faster.
Just as a meaningless followup, I made several "pulls" in the liner outer fabric when getting the pad off. But when I heated the liners for remolding, using the "heat oven to 300 F, turn off, put liners in for 10 minutes" method, the fabric relaxed itself and there are no slack areas in the molded liners. That was nice.
These are just Intuition made-in-China liners, and I know the cutting edge has moved on to other things, but I feel Intuition should get props for forcing the ski boot world to improve its liner game, compared to some of the heavy inflexible liners that used to be the standard.
Move on to what? Zips may be the popular thing these days but they've actually been around longer than intuition. They may last longer but they also cost 3x as much and are wayy heavier. Intuitions are tits.
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