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

To someone who knows about saddles, there is a "look" to a saddle built on a good, hand made tree that is neater, cleaner, more refined.  One of our good customers became a customer after winning a saddle competition.  When he asked the judge (a very qualified and well respected saddle maker himself) what else he could do to improve his saddles further, one of the responses was "You need better trees".  The look of his saddles was being held back by the foundation he was building on.  Rod and I took time to brainstorm and try and pinpoint what the differences might be.  Here's some of what we came up with.

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 the series on anatomy, we are moving on from the bones to the muscles that are important in regard to saddles.  I want to start with a few basic facts about muscles.

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

Rod was working on this exposed wood post horn on a Modified Association tree last week.  The wood is Padauk, which is an African hardwood.  Our horn caps are all hardwood anyway - maple or Baltic Birch plywood - so working on hardwood isn't an issue.  But finishing them so they are "real purdy" takes a lot of time.

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

It is pretty well known in the cowboy world that you don't want your cinch, latigos and billets to be all synthetic material.  You want at least something (preferably all) to be of natural materials so there is some give, a little bit of stretch so your horse can expand his chest as he breathes.  When you consider the anatomy of the equine rib cage and realize how relatively rigid it is, it isn't overly surprising that that there isn't a whole lot of change in total circumference, which is what allows a cinch to hold the saddle on at all.  (If there was a lot of change with every breath, either the cinch would hang loose part of the time or it would obstruct his breathing with every breath.)  What is interesting is research that shows that the total change in circumference of the chest where the cinch goes is less than an inch, even when the horse is galloping. (1) 

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 we try to give people good reasons to order a hand made tree as opposed to a production tree, the two reasons we discuss first are always the superior quality of workmanship and materials used.  The order of these two is interchangeable, so we will start with workmanship.  This is higher for two primary reasons.  The first is that every tree is individually made by Rod - no employees, no duplicating machines, no production line.  Rod doesn't take preshaped parts off a machine to assemble them.  He shapes them individually for every tree he builds so they fit together like they were made for each other - because they were!  The second reason correlates closely to the first:  It is our name, not a company name, that goes on each tree and our reputation that goes with every tree we ship out.  With sixteen years and over 2100 trees behind us, that name on the tree still means a lot to us, and we stand behind our work.

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

So if you are tired of pictures of snow (I am, especially the one outside my window), here's some pictures from the inside of the shop this week.  Here's the standard normal set up when Rod starts cutting out his next set of four trees.  He starts with the table tilted to the highest degree needed and cuts out everything he needs to there, then lowers it to the next angle, cuts things out, and so on, and so on, and so on...  Here he is cutting out the angle on the bottom of the fork that both sets the angle of the bars on the horse and the angle of the fork on the bars.  These three dimensional things are interesting...

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

Remember this picture from just two weeks ago?  Well, last Friday...

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

The only section of the skeleton we haven't talked about in previous posts in this series is the rib cage, so here it is.  Considering that the rib cage supports the majority (but not all) of a western saddle, how it is shaped and how it moves is very important for how a saddle fits and works on the horse.  It is important to know that the horse has 18 ribs, which is a lot compared to other domestic animals.  Pigs have 14 to 15.  Cows, sheep, goats, cats and dogs all have 13.  People only have 12.  The fact that horses have that long a rib cage to support a saddle is one of the reasons I think they really were designed to be ridden!

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

Rod and I got brainstorming about why someone should pay the extra dollars to get one of our trees rather than just buy an "off the shelf" model from a production company.  What benefit does the saddle maker get from using one of our trees?  We came up with quite the list, under two main categories: