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

Troubleshooting Saddle Fit Problems

This series was originally written for saddle makers to help them deal with their customers. However, the information contained in it can be used by individual horse and saddle owners to help them understand and diagnose their own "saddle fit" issues.

The dreaded statement…

“This saddle doesn’t fit my horse.”  When someone comes into a saddle shop and says this, there are a multitude of things that could be causing the problem. It could be the rider, the horse, how the horse is used, the saddle tree, the saddle itself, or padding or other tack. The job of the saddle maker is to figure out which one thing or, more commonly, which combination of things are the cause of the issue - real or perceived. These pages are an attempt to categorize what needs to be considered and evaluated in order to properly identify and correct the problem.

What's in the next six web pages

First, we need to understand the Signs of Saddle Fit Problems. There are likely more than what we have on this page, but these are the most common ones anyway.

Next, we want to understand the Reasons for "Saddle Fit" problems. The quotation marks are there because, as you will find if you read the pages, some of the issues have nothing to do with the saddle. Part One discusses the first two Reasons. Part Two talks about two more Reasons, and the last three Reasons are dealt with in Part Three. 

Once you have this information, you can move on to Diagnosing the Saddle Fit issue by following the history, observation, physical examination and further testing model used in veterinary medicine.

The final page contains a link to a downloadable Quick Reference Chart so you can correlate signs of saddle fit issues with possible reasons you can check out more. 

To learn more, you can purchase our 67 minute Western Saddle Fit - the Basics video via streaming. You can also order it in DVD format. (We should have called it by "More than Just the Basics" since it contains more solid information on Western saddle fit than we have found anywhere else, but we aren't good marketers...) 

If you want to dig deep in the subject, we have a six hour series on Western Saddle Fit - Well Beyond the Basics available to purchase via streaming.