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

Like I said in my last post, I was really interested in the history of saddle trees and saddle tree makers as I read through this book.  I found some information on them, though not near as much as I would have liked.  And I discovered that, despite how "the golden age of cowboys" is often portrayed, there really has been improvements in saddle trees since then.

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

I recently re-read the book They Saddled the West by Lee M. Rice and Glenn R. Vernam.  It was published in 1975 and is a history of a lot of the major names in saddle making from the mid-1800's to the early to mid 1900's.  Very interesting reading if you are interested in the development and changes in design of North American saddles during that time period.

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 were sent this tree to duplicate because the owner said it was broken.  (I have written posts lately about this tree and some of the ways we do things differently.)  It had functioned well for years as a working cowboy's saddle (though he said he had to be careful with the Arizona bars) but lately it has been soring up horses.  There was no specific wreck or time when he thought it may have been damaged, but something had definitely changed, so he figured the tree was broken.

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

After the previous posts I have written about how this tree was built differently than ours, maybe you're wondering how the new one turned out?  Some trees are much easier to duplicate than others, based on how differently the tree maker's angles, shapes, etc. are from ours.  This one was a doozy!  Here is the finished tree in the wood.  Does it look identical to the first one?  No.  Will the old leather fit back on it?  Yes.  And that is the whole point.  Here are some of the key things we considered when building this tree.

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

In part one about this tree we are duplicating, I showed you the differences that could be seen with the rawhide still on between this tree and the way we build trees.  This post is about what we can see with the rawhide off.

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

On our Cantles Conundrums page, we talk about the three different slopes you see on a cantle:  The slope of the edge of the rim (which we term the cantle angle), the slope of the back of the cantle and the slope of the face of the cantle.  About half way down the page we talk about how the slope of the face of the cantle is affected by dish, the cantle angle, and the height of the cantle.  Here's an example of how this works out in real life...

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 have another tree in to duplicate, and there are lots of interesting things about this tree we noticed and discovered, so I wanted to share with you some of the ways tree makers do things differently.

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

I am working on a blog post about how "every saddle tree maker does things differently", but I won't have time to finish it right now.  Why?  We are headed to town pretty quick here to ship and deliver five trees.  Well, six actually, since we are returning one that we duplicated.

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 I did the post on December 11th of pictures taken around the shop that night, there were a lot of extra trees hanging around (sometimes literally).  While we don't usually have that many finished trees waiting to be shipped, such was the case last week.  But things have changed...