You can now purchase our 67 minute video, Western Saddle Fit - The Basics, by going to our new website, westernsaddlefit.com. We also have a 7 minute YouTube video on Western Saddle Fit - The Essentials.  Enjoy!

Today was an exciting day!! A big yellow truck drove up to our house…

You can now purchase our 67 minute video, Western Saddle Fit - The Basics, by going to our new website, westernsaddlefit.com. We also have a 7 minute YouTube video on Western Saddle Fit - The Essentials.  Enjoy!

We keep mentioning the video we are producing on Western Saddle Fit. Many of you may remember last May when a major forest fire ended up burning a fair proportion of the city of Fort McMurray in north-eastern Alberta. It was nicknamed “The Beast”. Well, this video project has morphed into a monster named “THE VIDEO”, well deserving of all caps and a deep voice, if not ominous music...

Rod got all fancied up for a Christmas banquet this year. He even waxed his mustache for the first time in years! And it was the first time he was able to wear “the trinket” one of our good customers had sent us.

You can now purchase our 67 minute video, Western Saddle Fit - The Basics, by going to our new website, westernsaddlefit.com. We also have a 7 minute YouTube video on Western Saddle Fit - The Essentials.  Enjoy!

In 2007, the Australian tree and saddle maker Dennis Lane first showed paper copies of his Equine Back Profiling System to a few saddle makers, including Jeremiah Watt who posted about it on a blog he wrote for the Western Folklife Center (now no longer available, unfortunately). Over the next couple of years, Dennis, with the help of his friend, saddle and tree maker as well as engineer David A. Morris, worked on getting the system into an easily usable, easily transportable, easily saleable format – the plastic cards which you have seen on our website before. (If you are not familiar with Dennis’s system, I suggest you go to his website and click the EBPS link so you know what we are talking about here -and order a set!) Here are the three musketeers from when they came way up north to visit us on their 2008 trip over the ocean – from left to right, Hank Statham, Dennis Lane and David A Morris.

Last January, Greg made the long trek four miles down Alder Ridge Road to take our tree making course. We have known Greg since Rod first took him out hunting when he was twelve, and we have enjoyed watching him grow and learn in many ways over the years.

You can now purchase our 67 minute video, Western Saddle Fit - The Basics, by going to our new website, westernsaddlefit.com. We also have a 7 minute YouTube video on Western Saddle Fit - The Essentials.  Enjoy!

I’ve had a couple discussions in the past week about how to deal with downhill horses. (Yes, despite life changing, we still talk a lot about saddles, trees and horses.) Lost in the archives, in the middle of the section on evaluating a horse for fit, I talked about how we decide if a horse is downhill or not.

When we started the business over twenty years ago, Rod built his workbench, and the table. He built them the same height as each other so they would match, and the height chosen was the height of the table on the band saw. This way he could use either table or bench to support the end of a long board that hung a long way out past the band saw when cutting.

I know this isn't about horses, or saddles, or trees - but suicide has touched our lives personally a number of times. The barricades that stop us talking about mental health need to be broken so that hope can come to suffering people. This first time event consists of eighteen hours of incredible music from thirteen professional concerts across the country, all volunteered, with the goal of bringing awareness to mental health and suicide prevention. The concerts are free, and it is being live streamed from a link on the website for the full duration of the concert.  Some of the artists normally command thousands of dollars per performance, but all the musicians and almost everything about this event is being volunteered by people who see the need to open up communication and remove the stigma about suicide and the mental health issues that so often lead to it. Information about mental health and suicide prevention will be available at all the venues and people will be present to talk with as well. Please go to the website to learn more, share the links, live stream the music or, if you are close to the venues, go to the concerts themselves.  It will be a day of hope and education. Please join it!

If you want to know more about the background to the concert, here is a link to a short video where the president of this organization, Elizabeth Turnbull, talks about the concert and her late husband.

You can now purchase our 67 minute video, Western Saddle Fit - The Basics, by going to our new website, westernsaddlefit.com. We also have a 7 minute YouTube video on Western Saddle Fit - The Essentials.  Enjoy!

In part one about rider effects on the horse, we talked about the effect of movement - horse and rider - on how the rider impacts the horse. (Pun completely unintended.) But how about rider position? What have studies shown about that?