We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

Here is a link to an interesting TV show, Inside Nature's Giants, looking specifically at the special things about horse anatomy that enables them to run as fast and as far as they do.  They look at not only the legs but also the lungs and heart and even how the horse's gut works with its breathing as it runs to keep the oxygen moving.  (Yes, there are dissection pictures in it too.)  Another snippet I found interesting is that the measurements taken on Eclipse, a famous racehorse from 200 years ago, puts him right in the center of average of thoroughbreds today.  While we don't agree with the evolutionary bent of the show, it really is fascinating to see how a horse was created to move the way it does.  Enjoy!

Inside Nature's Giants: Racehorse

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

filling up the drying stones again!  Five trees drying now.  Sideways on the left is a Wade with an 8" wide fork (hard to see from this angle).  Then, going left to right, a 13 " wide OY Calf Roper, a 14 1/4" wide Modifed Association, a 9" wide Wade and a 14" wide wood post Louellen.

When the rawhide is wet, it is always whitish.  As it dries, it goes clearer, and the color changes depending on what color the hide was originally.  The Louellen on the right and the Wade on the left are obviously blacks, and the other Wade and the Modified Association will go a nice tan color since they were from red bulls.  As white as the OY Calf Roper looks now, it will go dark since it was from a black bull.  There is a variation in how dark they get, so it may not be quite as dark as the one on the left, but it will be a dark color when it is dry. 

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

When it comes to saddle fit and the forelegs, there are a lot of questions still to answer, and there are a lot of “answers” presented as fact that are untrue.  Most of the reason the answers are unknown is because there is still a lot unknown about how the front leg actually moves in real life.  And why that is unknown has to do with the anatomy of the front leg and how it is attached to the body.

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

This is what our drying stones look like at the moment.

This is what they normally look like.

Why the difference?  Let me explain…

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

We had a good holiday last week.  We went to Fairmont Hot Springs, B.C., where Denise’s aunt graciously gave us her time share for a week.  Here are some pictures of our time away. 

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

We made our annual wood buying trip this week.  For our hardwood, we go to Edmonton (a four hour one way drive) to PJ White Hardwoods to pick out a lot of our wood for the following year.  They get the lifts of the correct type and thickness of wood out from their piles of lumber, cut the bands and then allow us to go through the lifts board by board and choose which ones are suitable for our purposes.  Here, we are checking out the 2” thick yellow poplar we use in our bars.  We are over half way through this lift.  The ones we want are on the left.  The ones we don’t want are in the middle, and Rod is checking out the ones we have yet to go through on the right. 

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

With the front legs, of course!! Well, at least that is what we did.  Before boiling out Arnie's bones, I had put all the small bones from each leg into a wire mesh “bag” we made out of screening.  That way they would at least stay sorted by which leg they belonged to at the beginning. 

We started by laying them out in order.  In this picture, we had already hot glued the splint bones back to the cannon bone and glued together the seven carpal (knee) bones.  We followed the picture in my anatomy books to help, but it was really neat how they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.  A very well designed system, it was surprisingly easy to figure out what was what, especially since with Arnie’s arthritis, some of these small bones were fused together.

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

We just shipped out a tree with our first order for Hamley Hangers in 15 ½ years of building trees.  It is fun to be in a profession where you can still be doing different things 15 ½ years after you start!  The idea for this style of “stirrup bar” came from the Hamley company a long time ago, but it never did become really popular.  One of the problems was stirrup wear.  A stirrup leather going over a relatively narrow bar of metal will wear more quickly than one going over the bar of the tree, which is much thicker.  The advantage to them is supposed to be greater stirrup swing.  Rod had to make a few changes on these bars to use the Hamley Hangers.  Here's what he did.

We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.

Yes, we really do have a skeleton in our basement!

Arnie belonged to a neighbour of ours.  He was a minature horse who was getting on in years and was obviously very arthritic when he was put down in April of 2010.  (He has some interesting changes in his bones.)  Our niece Rachel came for a day to learn basic anatomy, and we cleaned all the meat off the bones then.  Later, we boiled out the bones to get them totally clean.  It takes about two, twelve hour days of boiling every bone to do this.  Since they didn't all fit in the container at one time, it took a few days.  And no, we didn't do this inside!  Rachel came back in the summer and we took about three weeks to get him all put back together again. 

Over time, I plan to write about basic anatomy and how it functions as I tell you how we put him all back together again.  Although I always enjoyed learning anatomy, it has been a few years since vet school, so we all learned a lot with this project.  Besides, having a skeleton in your basement is kinda cool!  And yes, Rachel did get extra credit at school for doing a special project.  She sure put the hours in!