cwood3

I have watched his videos on YouTube and think they are great. I know he has a series of 4-DVD's for making 3 different kinds of saddles (8-hours per set). Has anybody watched those? I am AOK with $200 per set, just wanted to get some outside input. Thanks

I am new to leather work. Never built a saddle. I'm 58 and my hobbies are building acoustic guitars and split bamboo fly rods. I'm a mechanical engineer (welding engineer for a large co.). Good eye/hand coordination....craftsmanship skills, etc. My dad has raised Tennesee Walkers for 30 years. Plenty of horse sense, but I have always been detached from that due to overseas travel and other endeavors. So, I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on a CB4500 (Cowboy Bob, chime in). I'm going to do gun leather, biker heavies, and saddles are certainly going to crop up. So, the main thrust, after all this jibberish, is about jumping into saddle tree information. All our horses are saddled up fine, no need to address them. Saddle trees.......I want to learn on a tree that is a production (something Bowden, or others, might have in stock), not custom, just so I can go through the motions. I know the cost of knowledge comes through experience at the price of screw ups. What tree would you buy to get there? I know there is no real answer to this question. But thanks anyway.

After much reading and looking at pictures of drawdown stands, and the Stohlman stand issue, would this be of any benefit? Make the top (where the bars rest) flat but be able to pivot the rear of the stand up or down? The pivot point being the very most front (as a horse stands) of the drawdown stand. That way moving the rear elevation doesn't change the front (just behaind the withers) height...? Just a thought. Be easy enough to do. Do the measure tree-on-horse-with-ruler-and-level, adjust the drawdown stand....set it and forget it. I just want to learn the methodology to do all this properly.....any horse deserves that much. Thanks

Rod/Denise, I'm a first-time poster and this may be a little weird. I live in Spring, Texas, 53 y/o, oil/gas mechanical engineer...etc. All my life I have developed strange hobbies (build guitars acoustic&electric, tube amps, wooden duck decoys, furmiture, accomplished welder, nice little garage machine shop, build benchrest rifles, and a few other strange tasks). I'm at a point in life to where I have the budget to obtain the "correct" tools and supplies for my hobbies, bless the Lord. I will never be a professional saddlemaker, but I might make a saddle. I go slow with my hobbies, mainly because my real "engineer" work projects keep me on the road all around Texas a lot of the time, but I am passionate when I am at home. My philosophies and how I approach a project may be out in left field but it suits the way I operate. I'm way more of a craftsman than an engineer, in my heart & mind. Kind of like the brain surgeon working his way through tap-dancing school. I want to figure out how to build a correct wood/rawhide saddle tree before I build a complete saddle. What is a logical approach?..................or better yet, am I being logical at all....? Thanks, curtis