Old Visalia Saddle

[thenrie]

This evening I dissected an old saddle my dad has had for years in his workshop. It was just an old saddle and was missing all the leather except the pommel cover. It had obviously had several repairs to the rigging and tree before they finally gave up on the saddle. The cantle had been broken and one bar had been reattached. The pommel was loose. The rawhide had been cut away in several places to effect the tree repairs. It was obviously beyond help as a reasonable restoration candidate, so I used it as a learning project. I was surprised, as I removed the rawhide, to find a paper label on the cantle that says, "Visalia".

Apparently was a nice saddle in its day. The pommel cover has the remnants of nice basket-weave stamping and the horn has the remnants of a braided rawhide horn cover. It was interesting to me how much leather was used in fairing the pommel to the bars and in the ground seat. It was a great learning experience for me. I took lots of photos, so I could remember what I saw.

[Chaed]

Hey thenrie, would you mind putting on some other pictures of different "stages" of the saddle as you dissected it? I would be very interested to see what it looked like. And are you going to rebuild what you stripped off or leave it at that?

-Anne

[thenrie]

I took the tree and set it on a small Quarter Horse I have. Since he's only about 13.5 hands, I decided to just see whether it would fit him, since saddles with regular QH bars are a bit wide on him. It seems to fit, or can be adjusted easily to fit, so I decided to rebuild the tree and build an old-style saddle for that particular horse. The tree currently has bars that have about a 88-89 degree angle, but the pommel was build with a joint in the middle, which is loose. I can spread the pommel enough to get a 90 degree angle without too much bar width for the above-mentioned horse, so I may just do that and re-glue it with epoxy at that angle. I think I'll reconstruct the tree and strengthen it with a layer or two of bi-directional f-glass cloth, then reapply a rawhide cover. Not sure yet whether I'll try the rawhide myself or have it done. The Nikkels have a pretty nice article on their website about it, so I may try it myself as a learning project.

Attached are a couple pics as I took the saddle apart. I'm doing this from my tablet, since I'm away from home. It takes forever to upload the pics and I can't resize them, so the forum limits the number I can upload. I'll post more as I progress, once I get back home.

[thenrie]

I just uploaded to a gallery a bunch of photos of the tear-down of the "Cactus Saddle" I mentioned above with the Visalia tree. I guess the album must first be approved, so it should show up later. I thought it best to put the photos in a gallery rather than to take up a lot of space on the forum. The album is entitiled "Teardown of a Visalia saddle, Tony Henrie (or something like that). I will add photos to the album as I progress through the rebuild.

I have not been able to spend a lot of time on it yet, but so far I have completely disassembled the tree, repaired the cantle, bars, and swells with modern wood glues and begun re-fairing them with auto body filler. I have recut the angles on the swells and cantle to reset the bar angle to fit a modern horse. I temporarily assembled the tree and tried it on my QH mare, but it was still a little narrow in the gullet and there was not quite enough twist, or wash-out, in the tails of the bars. My mare has low withers and a flat back. I tried it on an older QH gelding with taller withers and it fit him like it was custom made for him. I have decided to duplicate all the parts and reset the angles and reshape the bars a little to fit my mare. I'll recover both trees with rawhide (or maybe have it done for me) and build new saddles on them, based on some photos I have found of saddles that appear to have similar trees, such as the one attached.

I will update with photos as I progress. I expect I'll need lots of advice as I go.

As a side note, I bought Volume One of the Stohlman's set of saddlery books as a Christmas gift to myself. My birthday is this month and I intend to get the other two volumes.

Edited January 11, 2013 by thenrie