One of these things is not like the other...
We are no longer building saddle trees. We have two saddle fit videos available on our westernsaddlefit.com website. Western Saddle Fit - The Basics, aimed at riders, is available either on DVD or streaming on Vimeo while the six hour series Well Beyond the Basics, aimed more for professionals but understandable by anyone, is available by streaming on Vimeo. (We left this website up because we have had many requests to keep the information available.)
OK. So they are all different, but the biggest difference is the horn cap size, and that is what the song is referring to. (By the way, do they still do that song on Sesame Street? Is there still a Sesame Street?) This is the line up Rod faced this morning. He got the end two rawhided today. The middle two got two more coats of varnish each and will be rawhided Monday. Sunday is a day off and a day to worship God, which is far more important than rawhiding trees...
It is unusual for us to build three orders with horn caps this large all at one time. Anything larger than a 4" horn cap is fairly uncommon, and other than the charro tree, the largest cap size we have built is 5 1/2". Considering that the finished horn will end up about about an inch larger in diameter than it is in the bare tree, that is a pretty big horn.
So here is the rundown on this week's production:
The tree on the left of the picture has a 3" tall horn with a 5" cap at a relatively flat pitch of 24 degrees. (The whole tree is tipped forward a bit because the back of the bars are not sitting directly on the bench.) The customer also asked for a larger neck on the horn. The fork is 9" wide (remembering, of course, that there is no place to measure width on a slick fork.) That tree has a 5 1/4" stock thickness to balance out the look of the larger horn.
Next down the line is a 3" tall, 4 1/2" cap horn at a medium pitch of 27 degrees. That fork is 8" wide, which is generally our slickest Wade fork size except for special requests. It also has a 5 1/4" stock thickness.
To the right of that is a 3 1/4" tall, 4 1/2" cap horn at the flatter pitch of 24 degrees. It also has an 8" wide fork. This one has the 5" stock thickness of a normal Wade.
And on the end is the one that isn't like the others with the smallest cap size we make at 3 1/4" diameter. It is 3 1/4" tall which, with a small cap, looks tall. It is also at the flatter pitch of 24 degrees, which makes the back taller relative to the front which makes it look even taller than if it had more pitch to it. This is a duplicate tree and is slicker than our 8", so we called it a 7 1/2" wide fork. It only has a 4 1/2" stock thickness.
We have a whole section on our website on wood post horns with lots of pictures. Happy browsing!
