FAQ: Lucchese Date Codes
What follows is another of my infamous loooong posts unraveling a mystery I've been trying to solve.
Four months ago, I posted photos of my new-to-me Lucchese Crayton Mad Dog Goat boots and asked for information on them.
u/DaddyGoodHands quickly decoded them for me:
200717 is a stock number.
N1560 is the style number
7 is the toe style
4 is the heel style
13D is the size
01 18 means they were made in January of 2018
I followed that formula and was able to easily do the same for my two pairs of Lucchese ropers:
M1010 with roper toes and roper heels (because, you know, they're ropers) made in September 2013 and NV8814's made in January 2016.
Over time, I was able to put together the FAQ on Lucchese lines and model numbers I posted last month, placing the former in the "Lucchese Since 1883" line and the latter in the so-called Bootmaker line.
I've utilized that knowledge to help others like u/DaddyGoodHands did for me. Easy peasy.
But there's a plot twist.
I ordered some Classics from eBay a few days back and the inside numbers look like this:
The top codes still work the same way: The L denotes the Classics line, 6608 is the model number, and the 14 the toe (French) and heel (Cowboy). And the 0220 would indicate they were made in February 2020, right?
Not so fast, my friends!
In a chat, u/Lopsided-Guitar7602 told me he believed they were "early El Paso" Luccheses, meaning some time between their move from San Antonio in 1986 to the early 1990s. He guessed that the 0220 was February 20th rather than February 2020 but wasn't sure how to pinpoint the year.
Four days ago, a search of this subreddit's archive led me to a thread from ten months ago wherein u/LowFinal6582 confidently identified a similar pair as having been made on August 21, 1987. I asked how he could tell and he replied,
Lucchese has used at least three different date code methods since they first started using date codes in 1976/77. The ones they use today have the two-number year at the end of the code. Not so in the past.
The most important verification of my date on this pair is the stamp that reads "Since 1883 Lucchese". This is the same stamp they used on all their boots made in San Antonio, except those earlier boots said "Since 1883 Lucchese San Antonio". ou can see the difference in the image below.
The boots in this thread were made in El Paso in 1987 and Lucchese used the same stamp but they removed the "San Antonio" part from the bottom of the stamp. They did this for about a year or so. After 1988 they stopped using this stamp altogether.
I then showed him the above label on my Classics and he confirmed u/Lopsided-Guitar7602's suspicion: February 20, 1991.
He also identified some San Antonio-era Luccheses that are in the mail (indeed, ostensibly on the truck for delivery today) from this:
Rather obviously, since they left San Antonio in 1986, they're not from April 2024. (I'm quick like that.) By this point, I figured they were made April 24 of some year before 1987 (again....) and after they started adding date codes in 1976. LowFinal said, yes, 1981.
I asked for more detail on how he knew that. Using the two examples, I correctly guessed that the number before the L is the last digit of the year. But how to know the decade?
He wouldn't go into detail but confirmed my understanding that there isn't some handy-dandy guide out there one could consult.
I and another Lucchese enthusiast have discussed building such a guide but it will be a very lengthy process. One must consider several factor (e.g., blown label on pull, other marking in the shaft, etc.) to accurately date a pair of lLuccheses.
Having gone that far down the rabbit hole, I took to Facebook, where the algorithm had recently suggested a Lucchese Enthusiasts group. I saw that several people were asking dating questions and started a new thread yesterday trying to get more information.
I was able to confirm LowFinal's dates for my El Paso and San Antonio Classics. A contributor with the moniker Krew Wall Ace gave me a couple of insights that, in conjunction with what LowFinal gave me, helped a lot.
First, the demarcation between the current dating system, where the second line has month and year and this one, with last digit of the year, a letter, followed by day and month, was "either late 90s or early 2000s." Somewhere around the same time, they started stamping the codes horizontally rather than in the diagonal fashion seen in the 1981 and 1991 boots.
The combination of all of these factors really narrows things down.
There are no date codes before 1976 or 1977.
[December 2024 edit: A chat with u/Lopsided-Guitar7602 told me that Lucchese actually started putting date stamps in their boots in 1971, the same year that they began mass manufacturing boots. His personal pair of 1971's had this stamp inside:
Boots made between 1971 and 1986 will have a San Antonio logo branded inside them. Those is the earlier part of that period will have the badge-like logo as in u/Lopsided-Guitar7602's pair. At some point between then and 1981, they switched to the version in my 1981 boots pictured further up the post. (And I think that some point was late 1980/early 1981, as I've found a pair of July 1980 San Antonios with the shield logo on eBay.)
Boots made in 1986 will either have the San Antonio logo or a similar El Paso logo. So, the 6 should mostly sort itself out.
Boots made in 1987 will have the El Paso logo (i.e., the same "Lucchese Since 1883" branding as my 1981's but without the words "San Antonio") and a 7 ahead of the L in the date code.
Boots made from 1988 through "the late 1990s" will have a diagonal date stamp. And, again, this mathematically places any of these boots with a 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 in the 1990s since there's no overlap. I suspect the 1988 and 1989 boots will have a brown Lucchese tag sewn inside the pull strap and the 1998 and 1999 boots will have the black Lucchese tag as in my 1991 Classics. But I'm not absolutely sure of that.
A couple of months after posting this, I discovered another wrinkle. Several boots from the early 1990s were flummoxing me. For example, these boots from 1991 had this date stamp:
Forever, I was reading these as 1L004 and trying to figure out which month the zero represented. I finally posted it to the Lucchese Facebook group and Krew Wall Ace and Michael Mills solved the mystery for me. For months January through September, which have a single digit, Lucchese used 1-9. For October, November, and December, they switched to the letters O, N, and D. KWA initially identified these as October but Mills correctly saw that they were a D, for December, rather than an 0.
And boots made in the 2000s (the last quarter century!) will have horizontal date codes that conform to the pattern u/DaddyGoodHands taught me.
I suspect this will require some refinement, but it's likely a 95% solution for identifying Luccheses made since 1971.