Customizing Shoes from 1982 | Back to the Future Edition

When you think of Back to the Future, more often than not sneakerheads tend to gravitate to the Nike Air Mags…but Vick can’t be bothered by those. His favorite kicks from the movie? The Nike Bruins wore by Marty McFly. 

Today Vick is going to be customizing a pair of Nike Bruins from 1982 and making them look exactly like the pair in the Back to the Future Trilogy. 

While Vick does own a pair in the same color as the movies, the pair he’s going to be working on today is blue and white, so it’ll require a paint job on top of the other customization work. 

First Steps

The first step to this custom is removing the Nike branding from the tongue. For whatever reason, the Nike Bruins worn by McFly in the movies don’t have any Nike branding outside of the swoosh.

With the tongue tags now removed, we can start to clean the shoes. Vick doesn’t want to deep clean the entire shoe, because he wants them to look aged, just like if they were worn for the movies. 

Easy Clean

Vick used the Three Brush Pack and our Sneaker Cleaning Solution to do some light cleaning. He used the Soft Bristle Brush to clean the uppers and insides of the shoe and then skipped straight to the Stiff Bristle Brush to scrub the outsoles and midsoles. 

After the preliminary cleaning, the shoes look exactly how Vick wants them; aged…but still clean. 

Normally we wouldn’t put shoes this old in the washing machine, but because these are in such good condition for their age, we’re going to go ahead and throw them in. Vick stuffed the shoe and the laces in a RESHOEVN8R Sneaker Laundry Bag and put them through a full cycle in the washing machine. 

Removing the Yellowing

Out of the wash, the shoes have a little bit of yellowing that we want to remove. Vick brushed on RESHOEVN8R Sole Revive to the yellowed parts of the sole, wrapped them in Saran Wrap, and put them in the Vick 2000 to do its job. 

Vick didn’t want to remove all of the yellowing, so 30 minutes was all that was necessary to get these looking right. 

Fresh Paint

Now we can get to painting. After some prep with 800 grit sandpaper and a quick tape job, Vick laid down a white base coat on the swoosh and collar in preparation to cover it with the iconic red seen on McFly’s pair of Nike Bruins. 

Vick used his airbrush to lay down the red paint on the swoosh and collar, and in the process covered up the Nike branding on the heel. 

Dirtying the Nike Bruin

As you can see, Marty wasn’t too nice to his pair, and Vick wants to replicate that beat-up look. He did so using some sandpaper. The purposeful scuffs make these look that much more like the pair from the movie. 

To complete the look, we’re going to put some of the grime we removed back onto the sneaker. For this, Vick snagged some brake dust from Brent’s Camaro and rubbed it all over the scuffs on the shoe. 

Forty Years in the Making

And that is going to bring us to an end. Crazy that for this custom Vick cleaned the shoe, customized it, and then made it all dirty once again. Taking a 40-year-old shoe, making it look new, and then taking it back to that 1982-aged look isn’t as easy as Vick made it look. 

However, the process was well worth it. These look exactly like the pair Marty McFly was rocking in the Back to the Future Trilogy. 

We want to hear from you; would you rock a pair of 40-year-old kicks?

Click on over to our Youtube channel for more insane customs with Vick. 

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