I have Red Wings. Mine are steel-toes logger boots and may not fit the inexpensive criteria, but I really like mine and they can be resoled making the investment more long term than many modern boots.
2218 9" Logger
I have tried on their steel-toes shoes and low boot too and nearly bought a pair.
There is a European distribution system.
http://www.redwingshoes.com/europe/
As an aside:
One of my favorite books of all time talks about loggers and their boots. Norman Maclean in
Logging, Pimping and Your Pal Jim from
A River Runs Through It
Norman meets his summer logging partner:
But finally it was late June and there he was, sitting on a log across from me and looking as near like a million dollars as a lumberjack can look. He was dressed in all wool---in a rich Black Watch plaid shirt, gray, short-legged stag pants, and a beautiful new pair of logging boots with an inch or so of white sock showing at the top. The lumberjack and the cowboy followed many of the same basic economic and ecological patterns. They achieved a balance if they were broke at the end of the year. If they were lucky and hadnt been sick or anything like that, they had made enough to get drunk three or four times and to buy their clothes. Their clothes were very expensive; they claimed they were robbed up and down the line and probably were, but clothes that would stand their work and the weather had to be something special. Central to both the lumberjacks and the cowboys outfit were the boots, which took several months of savings.
The pair that Jim had on were White Loggers made, as I remember, by a company in Spokane that kept your name and measurements. It was a great shoe......in the Northwest most of the jacks I remember wore the Spokane shoe.
Jims pair has a six-inch top, but there were models with much higher tops---Jim happened to belong to the school that wanted their ankles supported but no tie on their legs. The shoe was shaped to walk or ride logs. It had a high instep to fit the log, and with a high instep went a high heel, not nearly so high as a cowboys but much sturdier because these were walking shoes; in fact, very fine walking shoes---the somewhat high heel threw you slightly forward of your normal stance and made you feel you were being helped ahead. Actually, this feeling was their trademark.
Jim was sitting with his right leg rocking on his left knee, and he gestured a good deal with his foot, racking the log I was sitting on for emphasis and leaving behind a gash in its side. The soles of these loggers boots looked like World War I, with trenches and barbwire highly planned---everything planned, in this case, for riding logs and walking. Central to this grand design were the caulks, or corks as the jacks called them; they were long and sharp enough to hold a heavily barked log or, tougher still, to one that was dead and had no bark on it. But of course caulks would have ripped out at the edges of the shoe and made you stumble and trip at the toes, so the design started with a row of blunt, sturdy hobnails around the edges, and maybe four or five rows of them at the toes. Then inside came the battlefield of caulks, the real barbwire, with two rows of caulks coming down the side of the sole and one row on each side continuing into the instep to hold you when you jumped crosswise on a log. Actually it was a beautiful if somewhat primitive design and had many uses---for instance when a couple of jacks got into a fight and one went down the other was almost sure to kick and rake him with his boots. This treatment was known as giving him the leather and, when a jack got this treatment, he was out of business for a long time and was never very pretty again.
I did a review of this books 3 stories over at JM's
http://outdoors-magazine.com/s_article.php?id_article=136
This is one reason why a chemist bought logging boots to work in our production facility....never did give anyone the leather.......not that I was not tempted at times :shock:
White's boots are still made and are on my list for someday....but for now the Red Wings fill in with a bit less agressive and more useful sole for normal jobs.
