Behind closed door...
We are no longer building saddle trees, but we have two videos about how Western saddles fit horses available on our westernsaddlefit.com website.
You may have noticed that, while in the summer I post pictures of Rod grinding away on trees, in the winter you mainly get pictures of him rawhiding, or sometimes cutting something out on the bandsaw. That is because in the winter, he is hidden away for much of the time behind this closed door…
in what we call the “dirty room”. Called that, surprisingly enough, because it gets dirty in there… Well, actually, more dusty than dirty. Lots of sawdust gets flung around by the side grinder and other sanding operations. The big blue tub with the furnace vent attached to our cyclone dust collection system really does collect a lot of the dust,
but despite having lots of air flow, not all of the dust goes into bin. Some of it ends up on the floor, where it gets swept into the corner till Rod bags it up. (He has to do it because that’s his room. I don’t go in there...)
The down draft table does a decent job of keeping the dust created by sanding from spreading around, but there is still dust lying around the bench from the grinding. But since the dirty room is only about 6’ x 7’, the dust is kept quite confined – which is the whole point of having a dirty room in the first place…
However, it takes an out of the world kind of prep to go work in there. Here is Rod prior to embarking (cue Star Wars music) into - The Dirty Room.
First, he puts on his Darth Vadar mask, which makes him talk funny.
Then he tries to do his Princess Leia impression by putting on his “ears”.
After which he picks up a whole tree in one arm and heads into the dirty room, “boldly going where no man has gone before”. (Oops. Mixing up my futuristic shows there. Sorry…)
And then he closes the door, back to the ol’ grind…
