Re-Waxing Belstaff Tourist Jacket

Video & Words by | Jun Song|

If you’re not willing to spend time, money, and the effort to provide proper care for your cotton wax jacket, then you probably shouldn’t own one.

My Belstaff Tourist Trophy Pure Motocycle jacket was long overdue for re-waxing maintenance. This is probably the most labor-intensive work I’ve done for any type of clothing, but it’s definitely a rewarding experience to be so hands on with restoring the jacket.

Here are the steps I took:

• Cleaned the jacket by wiping it down with a wet piece of cloth. Waxed cotton fabrics are not meant to be washed or dry-cleaned, so this the only way you can clean it. And you definitely shouldn’t use soap. Just water.
• I left it hanging to dry overnight. No real need to wait overnight. I just didn’t have time to wait for it to dry on the same day.
• There are many different brands of wax you can use, but I purchased Barbour Wax Thornproof Dressing form Orvis. I bought two cans because I wasn’t sure how much I needed, but I ended up using about half of one can for the whole jacket.
• To melt the wax, I heated a pot of water to just before the boiling point, and put the can in the water. I had to reheat the water three times during the whole process.
• To keep the wax from hardening immediately, I cranked up the room’s temperature to about 90 Fahrenheit (30 Celsius). Yea, you will be sweating while doing this.
• Simply apply the melted wax onto the surface of the jacket evenly. It’s very important to give extra waxing on the seams.
• On top of heating up the room temperature, I used a hot hair dryer on the areas where I was applying the wax. This delays the hardening of the wax on the fabric, helping it to better seep into the applied areas.
• Once finished, just hang it to dry.

I’m very satisfied with the outcome of re-waxing my jacket. Through a lot of use and abuse over the last year and a half, this jacket lost all of its wax-gloss look it originally came with. After the re-waxing, it looks like brand new.