BOA Warranty and Replacement Guide

Do your cycling, golf, snowboard boots, or running shoes have the BOA lacing system? This system has become ubiquitous for shoes and boots over the last few years and is now found on all kinds of shoes. Here is an example.

This is my Shimano mountain bike shoe with the BOA laces and dial. As you can see, my laces had become kinked and were fraying. This also caused the laces to catch and it had become harder to open the tongue of the shoe. This short guide is for getting a repair successfully done.

The shoes are roughly a year old and I looked on the Shimano site for warranty info and found that the BOA system is guaranteed for the life of the shoe. Wow! So, I clicked on a warranty link and that forwarded me right to the BOA site.

There are seemingly a gazillion different BOA systems depending on the shoe and they need to know which one you have to help you. That proved very difficult for me so on their form I uploaded the picture above. In a day someone from BOA sent an email detailing the system identifier and had the replacement parts in the mail.

So far, so good. I get this nice little mailer with the laces (plastic coated wire), part of the dial, and torx screwdriver. They give you a piece of paper with instructions that I found only slightly useful. Fortunately the BOA site has a nice video on how to do this repair. Click this link and watch it.

OK, so the day arrives when I have procrastinated long enough and should make the repair before the laces break when in a hurry to meet my cycling companions. I try to read the repair guide again and my middle-age eyes are not having it. Let’s queue up the video and watch it all the way through once without doing anything. Now, let’s start the repair and watch the video and stop at the end of each important part.

Here are some key takeaways that will hopefully make your repair easier than mine. My advice is to watch the vid all the way. Read these bullet points and watch again. Then start the repair.

1. Take a picture of how your laces are configured before you take them out. Note very carefully how the eyelets are threaded. I mean — look really close when you remove them about exactly where they are threaded. It was not easy to see on the Shimano shoe.
2. If you have poor close-up vision like me, get your best readers out and maybe a magnifying glass.
3. Once you get the dial apart it says to cut the wire and then measure it for the replacement wire. It doesn’t say how to get an accurate measurement because you are going to leave part of the old wire on the old dial. I used needle-nose pliers to get the old wire off the old dial in order to get a completely accurate length.
4. You must have a pair of wire cutters.
5. Rethreading the Shimano shoes was a super-pain. The eyelets are 1–2" long and the wire gets hung up inside. I had to keep pulling back and forth around 50x on a couple to get it pushed through. Like the proverbial pushing a rope uphill. In this case, persistence will pay off.
6. Getting the wire attached to the new dial requires much patience. The instructions are clear but my dials didn’t have the noted red dot. Still, it wasn’t hard to figure out because there is a notch on the dial and you will understand which hole is 1, 2, and 3.
7. Once you have the new wire threaded it seems difficult to cinch down. You are going to need to work the knot. This is a “dressing the knot” task. Remember that from your scouting or mountaineering classes? A very tiny screwdriver, like for eyeglasses, could help compensate for fat fingers.
8. On reassembly, there are some checks the video has you do to make sure it is operating correctly. The problem is they don’t tell you what corrective action to take if it fails. Mine would not tighten the laces and I found taking the outside dial off and screwing it back on fixed that. It took 3–4 times of removing and reattaching to get the laces to tighten and loosen correctly. It still feels a little tight when pulling them loose but works.

That’s it! Watch the BOA vid. Read these bullet points. Add my caveats to the BOA instructions — take pictures before, look carefully at eyelet threading, have wire cutters and needle-nose pliers, etc. And, most of all — be patient! This ended up taking me 30–45 minutes. If you have done this many times maybe it could be done in 5 minutes without anything going wrong. Relax. If you get frustrated, take a break and have a cup of coffee.

Good luck!