Aggiebraider

I would agree with this completely I bought an awl blade from Mr. Douglass a couple weeks ago and it is extremely sharp and works really well. I didnt buy a handle from Mr. Douglass I bought one from Barry King because he makes two sizes and I liked the larger size for my large hands.

Thanks for posting this Rob hopefully it will get stickied. I really liked seeing how you do the foundation and the nylon attachment on your heel knots. I was always curious how to get a piece of leather to cover the ends of each strand. CW

If you dont mind me asking, where did you get actual Zebra hides? Id love to use some for inlays in belts and not have to use cowhide thats colored to look like zebra. Great job on the knife and the sheaths! CW

Lol Casey, I am currently working on getting some things finished, and as soon as I do, I will post them. I havent been braiding with leather very long and never really took pictures of the stuff I made with paracord (mecates, headstalls, loping halters, jerk lines, etc.). I wanted to tell you how much I liked your engraving work you did on the Barry King mauls and told Barry the same thing when I saw him at Witchita Falls. I really with I could find some way to say the heck with all this school work, teaching, and everything else I have to get done so I can do leatherwork full time I sure would lol.

I have heard some people use locktite to hold their chicago screws in place. There are vary degrees of the stuff and if memory serves me right, the red kind isnt impossible to break loose if you are trying to replace the concho.

Well let me know if you do, because I am still somewhat in the market for one, especially if you figured out how to make a one person operation thats not too expensive

As far as bending them, I think that would prevent you from being able to change the size of the headstall with any kind of ease, which to me would be the only benefit to using this type of buckle. In which case, I would probably just scrap them and use them on another project. And when it comes to placement in relation to the eye, the only reason I would really worry about it with this headstall is the fact that the buckles are so large, and have a scalloped edge, and the fact that horses always seem to find something handy to rub their faces on when you arent watching them. This would give me a little cause for concern. Again, not being critical, just wanting to help out a fellow leatherworker and horse owner. CW

I have made a few mecates, but never twisted ones. I mainly have worked with paracord and have just within the last year started braiding with leather. I looked into getting a rope making machine to do exactly like you are asking, but they are expensive and it takes more than one person to run, unless you have some way of powering it. If you have any experience braiding, I know people have had really good success with braiding it for mecates. Only down side to this is that it takes SIGNIFICANTLY longer to braid 20+ feet rather than just twist it. I am currently working on a 12 strand mecate that has taken me about 2 weeks to braid off and on in the evenings because I decided I wanted to braid the core for it as well, so I have really braided 44 feet for one set of reins lol. But I think that you will get more material into the same length by braiding it, giving you more weight and because it is braided it will have more life. You also wont have the problem of having a twist built into the rope, that will dictate how you coil it up. If a person with no experience with using ropes or riatas picks up a twisted mecate and doesnt coil it correctly, you can get a horrible kink built in that will probably never go away. If you are set on twisting them or dont have any experience braiding, I know I saw somewhere a guy was selling plans for making a rope machine, but it involved making a planetary gear drive out of wood and if you arent an experienced wood worker (like myself) i think it would be almost impossible. So my suggestion would be to save your pennies and try to buy one of the antiques off ebay or get lucky and find one at an estate sale. Hope this helps, CW

I think you did a really nice job on the design of this headstall, especially by putting two buckles on. Its always nice to be able to adjust both sides, especially on split ears. The one thing I would change though is to take those buckles off and replace them with normal tongue buckles. I think that the posts in these would be entirely too irritating to the side of a horse's face, even though the headstall shouldnt move up and down much if you have it adjusted correctly. I am not one to baby my horses, a little hide worn off their nose never killed one, but I think these buckles are ones you should not use on a headstall of any kind. Just my two cents and if you have used similar ones in the past with no problems, ignore what I said and just take the praise for a job well done. CW

You may be better off talking to a custom buckle maker. I bought a buckle from Campbells at the show at Abilene earlier this year and was very happy with the price and the quality. They may not regularly carry or make that size buckle but I would bet they would be willing to give it a shot. I would contact them sooner rather than later, because I know they get really busy later in the year, and they should be around more since most of the steer trippings are over with for the year. Here is their website http://www.campbellsbitsandspurs.com/ Hope this helps, CW

I know someone already replied with what I was going to say, but I wanted to add something. I went to The Boot and Saddlemaker Roundup at Witchita Falls this weekend and met another member of the forum who in discussing using nylon vs horsehair or mohair for mecate reins, gave me some good advice he heard from somewhere else. The cowboys 100 years ago worked out in the rain, muck, and mud on a daily basis and had no means of protecting or treating their gear further than normal, and didnt worry about it getting wet. As long as you properly dry something between uses and dont let a rawhide bosal or a mohair cinch sit around the tack room wet for days, you should have no problems. If it gets rained on, I would just take it off the saddle and maybe hang it up. That way it gets some air circulation and doesnt lay across your saddle wet. CW

You could sure make a pineapple knot and maybe even use a piece of leather underneath, like a scarf slide. The way I have always made them out of nylon is to basically just use one strand and wrap the working end over the standing end around and around and around. You should probably do this 5 or 7 times depending on the size of the knot you want to make. Then on the next pass, you wrap the working end through the hole made from wrapping the working end over the standing end in the first pass. I know this may sound kind of confusing, but its really a simple knot to make. Im not sure how well it would work out using rawhide, because in order to secure the working end when you are finished, you just burn the nylon to the surrounding parts. If they are hard set on using rawhide, I would just make it like a large scarf slide. CW

Check with Columbia Basin Knot Company (www.cbknot.com i think)...they have a really good selection of yacht rope with both poly and nylon covers. And they are pretty horse savvy, so if you tell them what you are making they can hook you up CW

Do you have a picture of the stamp or the impression? Clay might be able to look at it and make a copy of the stamp. He's a member here on the forums and makes a few stamps

Hey everyone, Just thought Id let you know the new Shop Talk Tool Sale Catalogue is online (http://www.proleptic.net/). Some stuff has already sold, but there is still a good selection of head knives, some really cool draw gauges, and I saw they have 46 6" splitter blades for sale. Kinda wish I had a 6" rather than an 8" lol. Just thought everyone might like to take a look. CW

I would have to say bracelets are pretty profitable. Im just getting tired of working on knots that are so small. I think I need to make a bosal or 2 and get away from bracelets for a while lol

I would suggest getting a caliper. You have to watch and keep from compressing the strands as you draw down the jaws of the caliper, but if you get it set to a thickness you want you can just keep trying to slide in the strand. Once it fits, its the right thickness. This is how I do it at least. You can get a cheap digital caliper from Harbor Freight...I think mine was around $10 Hope this helps, CW

Bevan, That bosal looks even better than I could have imagined. I really like the color combos and CANNOT wait to get it. Now Im going to have to hurry up and get these reins done lol. Im really glad we've been able to work out this trade, I hope other will follow suit and we can revive this cool practice. Take it easy bud, CW

I think what you are seeing is just the flesh side of the leather and how it always looks. What you want to do is burnish this surface using something like gum tragacanth or a wax. This will align the fibers and smooth things out. If you search for burnishing in the forum, you will see a ton of posts about burnishing edges, and the concepts are the same. You will probably want to do this to things like belts that dont have a lining attached to the back side. If you already understand how to burnish something and this is a legitimate problem associated with the leather being too hard, ignore what I said. Hope this helps, CW

Not to burst your bubble or anything ASMA, but this study has some major flaws in it to say the least. First off, any equine based research that revolves around things like exercise and training can have many sources of error inherent within the project. The first of which is the error associated with rider differences. These can be things like weight, balance, ability (training and riding), what exercises are performed, etc. Now these statements are fairly generalized for all exercise based equine research, and not necessarily associated with this project alone, but I dont really feel like reading through this project again and finding all of the flaws. Denise and I discussed this project ad nauseam one evening and so I will let her weigh in on most of the problems as she has read through it many more times than I have. The major problem with this project is that it was performed by undergrads. While I am sure they had an advisor that oversaw the project and the experiments that were performed, that doesnt mean it was done correctly. One problem that I (think) remember from reading it was that they basically put one maybe 2 saddles on each horse and took the measurements based on where pressure was alloted over the horses back. The problem with doing it this way is that by doing a survey type study and looking at how one saddle affects that one horse, you have no replication within the study. This basically nullifies any type of statistical analysis that they could have run being as that they didnt look at how multiple saddles affect that one horse. Now I am not saying that they should have just used one horse for the whole study, but they should have limited their pool of horses to say around 20 and looked to see how multiple styles and manufacturers saddles fit that group of horses. While 20 may seem like a few, you can get a fairly good representative sample of the entire population this way. Now the counterpoint argument here is the fact that you should try to make the group all of similar stature and breed (not testing QHs against longer backed TBs or even drafts), and that would represent that subset of horses within the population. Getting back to the statistics part, they really didnt run the proper stats for this type of study or even any for that matter. Just looking at the means within a group of measurements doesnt tell you exactly whats going on or if those differences in the means are even statistically significant. Significance is the absolutely most important piece of information when it comes to statistics and research for that matter. The other problem that I saw was the fact that this project was done by a group of students in a Marketing Club and was designed to be a research project that could be used by a prospective saddle maker to get a loan for starting a business designed at making properly fitting custom saddles. The idea was a great prospect, but wasnt executed properly in my opinion. This is why the project was never published in a refereed scientific journal such as The Journal of Animal Science, The Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association, etc. There are other issues associated with this paper, but I really dont feel comfortable going into them without all of the information. I just tried to look at it for the scientific validity alone, and found very little. Proper research is a huge pet pieve of mine, and the major reason why sometimes people (especially saddle makers) are having trouble convincing a customer something that contradicts something they have seen on the internet. Every "expert" can come up with a statement they believe to be true and publish it where people can read it as gospel. I feel that saddle fit and back pressure is an area of research that is left wide open and could benefit from proper research, but the fundamental needs of research today dictate the difficult nature of doing so. A vast majority of research is done through funding from either private individuals, companies (such as nutrition and supplement companies), and government funding. Government funding usually revolves around problems associated with an entire population or an extremely severe problem such HERDA or Equine Infectious Enemia. Companies in the equine industry will typically only fund research that will make them money (and I dont blame them). This may come in the form of a new feed that could improve the efficiency or production of broodmares or ones that may solve a problem such as Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome. So this leaves private individuals that may have a hugely vested interest into the equine industry and want to solve a problem they themselves are having or one they are passionate about. This funding issue really comes from the fact that no one (to my knowledge) has come up with the money or the want to spend the time and energy involved with running a study designed at fixing this problem mostly likely due to the fact that the problem can be fixed so many different ways (proper padding, changes to trees, proper construction, etc.) Well its late, and I cant think of anything else to keep my on my soapbox lol. I hope this can help at least a few people look at research in the future as somewhat of a skeptic and really question its validity. CW

They are both in one of Grants books, without getting it out and looking, I want to say they are in the Encyclopedia of Rawhide Braiding or whatever its called. CW

Awesome! Looking forward to seeing this and meeting you both

The problems you see from the H.O. might just be a problem that Weaver is having. Have you tried to get the H.O. from any other sources or even H.O. directly? I know they have a minimum order requirement and require a tax id number, but you might be able to get a hide from someone local that buys it directly in bulk. If thats not an option, you might try Wickett and Craig. They are a tannery that you can buy quality hides from (I know some saddlemakers use it exclusively over H.O.) and they have no minimum requirement. I called and talked to them about some carving sides they have on sale for $95 a piece and they said I could buy 1 or 700 sides, so that aspect really appeals to me lol. Hope this helps, CW

I really like the armitas/chink combos....cool change from the normal traditional look for both

How do you want to make them? With a chain, without a chain, braided, etc? As far as a pattern, most styles are just straight straps, so the only thing you should need are the measurements. I can try and get some pics and measurements from some that my grandad made for me if you like. It will have to be after Monday though as tomorrow is too busy for me.