Building Another Saddle

[Chaed]

Hello Leatherworkers!

Some of you may remember me from my first thread Starting First Saddle. Well, I guess it was only a matter of time until #2 would follow, so here it is.

After #1 was built and thoroughly tested for a year, my appetite for saddle building returned. This time however I didn't want to build a western saddle. Being a long distance rider I always wanted a lightweight trekking saddle, so that became my goal. (Meanwhile the lightweight aspect kind of gave way to all the artsy ideas that keep popping up).

I'll document my journey from start to finish again and hope that it may help people still at the beginning of saddle building and of course, hopefully some of the experts will look here from time to time and tell me what all I'm doing wrong. God knows, I only notice my mistakes once it's far too late to fix them.

I already apologize for occasional back-to-back posting and the PIC HEAVYness of this thread. I'll try to keep the image size down.

[Chaed]

I. Brainstorming & Design

I like my western saddle, but for long trails it's too bulky. I started researching skeleton rigs, military, argentinian, peruvian, chilenean, spanish and italian working saddles. Pretty much the whole spectrum. I rallied about a hundred reference pics off of Google.
Next step was sketching. I think I sketched a tree worth of paper. This was my initial design.

Eventually I settled on this (stirrups and cantle slots not featured here). You see, it's heavily influenced by a McClellan, especially the rigging. I wanted a thicker fork than the original though to be more reminiscent of a peruvian model I've found. There is also going to be a lot of ornamental rawhide braiding involved, but I can't draw, much less on a computer, so we'll just leave it as a surprise. By this stage of design I also dumped the western rigging. Initially I wanted to go with a centerfire rigging, but I figured it was going to add a lot of bulk under my leg and without fenders this might prove to be a chafing issue later on. Instead I'll rig english style, still from front to back, but with a lower sitting cinch. We'll get to that eventually. And I might still change my mind a few times. Here's the pic.

After knowing what my saddle was going to look like (approximately), it was time for a tree. Obviously an off-the-shelf McClellan tree wouldn't do, so back into the world of custom trees I was. I talked to Rod&Denise Nikkel and they said they'd build me one, so I went back to the drawing board to show them what I wanted.

Thankfully they saw through my artistic handicaps and said they could do it in a way that would satisfy my designs, my purse and my horse. Obviously, we had a deal.

[Chaed]

II. Measuring & the Tree

As with my first tree, I made use of the Dennis Lane cards to measure my horse.

Speaking of, here is my horse. Meet Menthol, 19 yrs old Lippizzan mare, once again unwitting participant in her owner's saddle building adventure.

We took pictures with and without the cards, with and without tapes, with and without cooperation of the horse and sent a select batch to Rod&Denise.

Rod and Denise built the tree...

... and I tried it on the horse.

Ready to start building!

[Northmount]

Great to see you are back at it again. We'll be watching your work closely. I'm really looking forward to seeing your progress.

Tom

[DavidL]

Do you know the name of the board you are using? Also what type of measurement system is that (d8, 49, d10)? I've seen sketches of prototypes that use the same system instead of degrees and I can't seem to find what its called.

[Chaed]

DavidL, that's the Dennis Lane Equine Back Profiling System. I linked to the site in my post above, or you can just google it. The D9,D10, etc.. are the different back shapes and if you have a tree builder or saddlemaker who uses that system they know how those measurements fit with their trees.

[BondoBobCustomSaddles]

Chad, so you have started your new saddle, that's great. Using Rod and Denise for your new project is a really good choice. Be sure to keep us informed on your progress. I am looking forward to watching your saddle come to fruition.

Bob