Rod and Denise Nikkel

Many treemakers use just lime as you do Alen, although honestly most treemakers in the U.S. are getting their rawhide pre-made from Hereford Byproducts in Texas. I prefer to make my own. It is cheaper and I get better and thicker rawhide. The method I use is sodium sulfide and lime together, about 2 cups each in a cement mixer of warm water. Do this in a well ventilated area or use a mask. I put in one side and let it tumble around and the hide dehairs in about an hour. Then I pull it out and flesh it while the next one tumbles. When I am done fleshing and cleaning off the first one, the next one is ready to come out, sometimes in as little as 45 minutes. I also "scud" the hide after fleshing. This is scraping the hair side with the side of an old shoeing rasp which helps clear out the hair follicles. When I am done all the hides for the day, I rinse them two at a time, tumbling them in the cement mixer for an hour with running water flowing over them. This helps clean up the hide. Then I just soak them for two or three days, changing the water twice a day, to help clean them up nicely. The first water has dish soap in it. The rest are clear water. I then cut them to the pieces I need for trees, and either use them right away or freeze them. I do this with deer hide as well for my lacing, which I stretch and dry before cutting. It makes very nice hide that is definitely suitable for braiding. The hides I use for the trees are from mature bulls and cows. I like the thickness and the size of the hides. However, the best hide for braiding comes from skinny old cows, because you don't want much fat in the hide for braiding if you can avoid it. Rod

I'm just trying to figure out if anyone else in the world would even want such a tool. The first tree maker who saw it couldn't say, "Is there another one like it?" fast enough, so for building trees it works great. But would any other type of work want one?

A question for all you leatherworkers: Would anyone have use for a tool like the one pictured below? It is a T square that is flat, and it doesn’t exist anywhere to the best or our (and Lee Valley Tools) knowledge. It is used to make a precise horizontal line on both sides of an existing vertical one so that a line on both sides would be sure to be identical and at 90 degrees. Or it would draw both lines at the same time and make sure that the vertical line would be both centered accurately and a true 90 degrees to the horizontal line. It is used to be very precise in marking out patterns, making sure they are identical side to side. As well (if it had markings all along the bottom) you could use it to mark accurately, say, 4†out from the center even if that center part of the leather or wood was already missing. The reason I am asking is because we had this one made up and I use it all the time in marking out the parts of our trees to ensure both sides are identical. I sent the idea in to Lee Valley Tools, and they seriously considered making it, but decided not to because they didn’t think there would be enough of a market for it. This one we had made and the markings (for which be paid per mark, which is why it is only marked in certain places) are too wide and not totally correct so I have had to figure out how to compensate for it. I would really like a good one made by people who know how to make accurate rulers, etc. So – would anyone have a use for one in your business, or know a business where it would be useful? If I can prove there is a reasonable market, maybe I can get Lee Valley to reconsider and build me a good one…

Just to let all you people “down south†know about a great company that provides all sorts of top quality tools that you often can’t find elsewhere. Lee Valley (www.leevalley.com) is a family owned Canadian company that started small in 1978 and has grown over the years to have stores Canada wide (I’m not sure if they have expanded to the States yet or not) and do mail order all over the world. They originally started with wood working hand tools (they don’t carry power equipment, though they have bits, blades, etc. for power equipment), and have expanded over the years to now include hardware, garden tools and reprints on old books. They don't make anything specifically for leather work, but a lot of the tools they have would be very valuable for leather workers of all types. They carry items that you just can’t find anywhere else, especially copies of old tools that have gone out of production. They make them in their manufacturing wing – Veritas tools. They have an incredible selection of sharpening equipment – all types and price ranges. They make some nifty spokeshaves that you can’t get anywhere else. They have a great selection of hammers, nail pullers, etc. And once you start looking at their stuff, you find all sorts of things that you know will be very handy. Because if Lee Valley sells it – it works. If it doesn’t work, they quit selling it. I don’t know if they have everything on their website or not. It is well worth your time to get their catalogues to “peruse at your leisureâ€Â. They have good pictures and let you compare all the items they carry. They tell you the truth about the tools – where it works well, where it doesn’t, what it is designed to do and its limitations. And they do with style and humor. (Where else would you read a description which includes the following: - for a box tool - “Crudely made but tough, it’s perfect for the person whose usual solution is to use a bigger hammer, or who tends to leave tools out in the rain. It can’t get much uglier.â€Â) They are a solid company with real integrity. When you phone, they promise you will always get a human being, not an annoying machine – and you do. Except on Sundays when they promise to stay closed to give their employees Sunday off to spend with their families – and they do. Their sales people are not on commission. They are there to help you find the right tool for the right job, not just something they have to sell. They have at times referred us to other businesses when they felt our needs could be met better elsewhere. The staff in the store and on the phone are knowledgeable and helpful and polite. They promise to listen to their customers – and they do. For any returns (very rare) they promise to pay the return postage – and they do. No, we are not being paid to advertise, but they really are who they say they are in the “About Us†section on their web site (worth reading). They also stock all sorts of things that leatherworkers of all types will find helpful, and we thought maybe you might be interested in checking it out. As an aside, the founder – Leonard Lee – has now “retired†and his son Robin is in charge of the company (but he has inherited his father’s humor). Leonard is off working on a new project – making surgical instruments. A lot of common surgical instruments were designed a century or more ago and haven’t changed since. Anyone who has needed to use a basic scalpel handle knows that there has got to be a better design. Lee Valley started making ergonomically correct handles that hold scalpel blades for wood carvers. It seems some surgeons got a hold of them and called Leonard up, saying that the wood didn’t sterilize well, and could he make them some in a different material…

We met Fred Harsant at the Sheridan show in '97 and '98. He was an Aussie. We heard a few years ago that he had passed away, but can't remember who we heard it from.

We know that different makers use different points at which to mark the full or center fire positions, which of course affects all the other positions. Our questions to saddle makers are: What do you prefer to use as your marking points and why? And is there something that a tree maker could to do make it easier for you?

Interesting question, Steve. Got me doing some research. Obviously, oiling bare rawhide is a bad idea. But treemakers generally use a coating of some kind on their trees to protect the rawhide. So the question is – does oil penetrate a solid covering of the protective coating? Every tree makers seems to use something different. We use Behr Super Spar Marine Varnish – the satin or matte finish. It is an oil based varnish. We like this one because contact cement will stick to it without roughing it up which breaks the barrier and rather defeats the purpose of coating it. So I called Behr and asked one of their technical support people if oil would penetrate this. First off, the guy told me that to get oil to penetrate I would have to remove the coating. I explained how we use their varnish, and that we don’t want oil to penetrate but wonder if it would, and he said he would check and see what he could find out. After listening to quite the interlude of nice classical music, he came back on the phone to inform me that “this product was not intended to be used for that purposeâ€Â. And no, he didn’t have any more helpful information one way or another for me. But we feel that Pure Neatsfoot Oil, not being a petroleum product, shouldn’t penetrate. But maybe there is that information about some of the other coatings that are used by different tree makers. I would suggest you phone them and ask the question. They can then call the tech support line of the product they use and see if the information is available for it. Or maybe some company could do the R and D needed to make a product “intended to be used for that purposeâ€Â. I am sure they would recoup their research costs in a century…or two…

If you are looking for a wood and rawhide tree, there is one (a Youth Bowman Roper) listed in the Hadlock and Fox catalogue. It says it has seat sizes 13, 13 1/2 and 14". But I think that any of the tree companies (Hadlock and Fox, Bowden Brand, Timberline, etc.) would make youth trees of many kinds and sizes. Just phone them and ask. And of course, any of the hand makers could make you one, for a price!

Another tree maker who hand crafts all the excellent trees he puts out is Warren Wright of New Zealand. Dale Harwood acts as his rep. in the States. Warren has been building trees for a lot of years, and can turn out an amazing number of trees in a year considering that they are all individually hand done by himself. I don't think he sleeps a lot.

Just an additional note. While I have used probably an excess of words to describe what we look at when we try to fit a horse, I need to say that saddle fitting is not rocket science. There are two basic rules: 1.) Don't get in his way. Make sure that the edges - the front, back, top and bottom of the bar don't dig in anywhere, and the cantle and fork gullets don't contact the horse. 2.) Within those margins, keep as much contact with the horse as you can. In other words, shape it the way they are shaped as much as possible. If you do those two things, you will have a good fit. We are not trying to fit camels, elephants and donkeys here. A horse is built like a horse, with some variations. Problems arise when rule number one is broken. You can have a lot of leeway with rule number two and still "get away with it" (ie. not hurt the horse) because of the movement of the horse under the saddle. This is why if you have a tree that is correct in the basics, it will fit a wide range of horses well enough to be used comfortably. As far as the rigging position goes, we approach it as it relates to tree position on the horse. We are looking forward to reading about how it relates to everything else from the saddle maker's point of view.

Susan, Thanks for the extra info and the pictures of your mare. They help in getting a better picture inside our heads of what your horse looks like. In reading what David has said, it is obvious that we think in a very similar way on a majority of things. We also try to fit a type or style (general shape) of horse, and would not want to say that "This tree will fit this breed of horse". There is too much variation within a breed to label a tree as being made for one breed, or especially to claim that it will fit all members of that breed. On the other hand, if a breed has relatively few individuals in it, and all those individuals are closely related, they will tend to be built more similarly than a breed with many individuals coming from different seed stocks. Even so, we still would not choose to label a tree with a breed name. We often get asked about rigging position and how that affects the fit of the tree. Our answer generally is that if the tree fits the horse well, the rigging position is not going to move the tree out of position, though if the tree was placed out of position, it might be possible for the cinch to hold it out of position in a few instances. An analogy which might help would be to picture a couple of tea spoons from the same set. They match in size and shape and fit into each other well. If you move the top one back so its bowl sits on the edge between the bowl and the handle of the other one, and then wiggle them a bit, they will slide together so they fit. Even if you tie the two handles together as tightly as you can (imagining that the handles are smooth on all sides) and then wiggle them, the bowls will still move to fit together because there is nothing that inhibits that movement. In the same way, a tree that has a shape on the bottom that matches the shape of the horse underneath it will shift into the place it should fit as the horse moves. Ideally, the saddle would have been placed in the correct spot originally. The position of the rigging (unless it somehow inhibits the movement of the saddle) won't affect where the tree sits on the horse - if the shape is correct. (This is how the old vaqueros were able to use a center fire rig and rope off it. The trees had to fit their horses back then. If the fit wasn't good, the saddle would have moved all over the place just riding, let alone when it was used to rope with.) Back to our analogy: If the spoon handles have bumps on the sides, and if you place the two spoons where they don't fit together, then tie the handles together at the point of two mismatched indentations, you would be able to keep the two spoons from sliding into the spot where they match. This would be the equivalent of holding the saddle in the wrong place with a breast collar or crupper. If you take a teaspoon and a tablespoon and try to fit them together, the two bowls will go together, but there will be a lot more movement between the two as you wiggle them around. This is probably the more common situation between a lot of horses and the trees in the saddles they wear. The shapes are close, but not quite right, and so padding, etc. can make a difference that makes the saddle usable where it won't hurt the horse. If you take a teaspoon and a fork or, worse yet, a knife, and put them together, they will be sliding all over the place, off the side of each other etc. This is what happens when the shape of the tree and the horse are very different, and you can't make that tree work for that horse, no matter how you pad it. So when you say that the whole saddle slides forward and the cinch becomes loose, what is happening is, indeed, a tree fitting issue. The shape of the bottom of the tree doesn't fit the shape of the horse's back, and unless there is something to hold it where it is placed, it goes looking for a spot it will fit better. In your case, it moves further forward. That doesn't mean it was meant to fit there. It just means that the part of the tree that most closely fits the shape of some part of the horse's back got together with that part, regardless of where it was "supposed to" be. And it shows how poorly the match is between the shape of this horse and the "typical" tree is - which is why you started this thread in the first place. And as David said, "rigging position is dependant on where the tree maker designed the tree to fit". So, as in so many areas with trees, the actual number may not mean a whole lot anyway. You mention "gaps between front of tree and back of tree along horses' backs (one or both sides)". I am interpreting this to mean that the saddle is bridging - contacting at the front and the back but not the middle. Is this correct? Firstly, if it only affects one side, there is asymmetry. Whenever one side is different from another, something is wrong. It is not just a mismatch in size or shape. Something has to be different from one side to another. This could be a fault in the tree construction, a fault in the saddle construction, a difference in the horse, either congenital or more commonly induced by how they use their body, a difference in how the rider sits, disparity in the blankets or pads, etc. etc. But something is wrong and needs to be fixed. This is a different issue than the shape these horses need to fit them. If both sides bridge, it means there is not enough rock in the tree for the length of the bar on this back. This goes along with the back of the bar digging into the loins that you mentioned earlier, as well as having "short backs that rise up slightly into the loin" that you mentioned in your first post. We checked out the Spanish Mustang Registry site and got a few more looks at different horses. One of the things that struck us is how relatively small "the average" Spanish Mustang is compared to "the average" Quarter Horse for which the majority of production Western trees are built. While you want as much surface area on the horse's back as possible to distribute the weight better, you are limited to the area that will not cause interference with the horse's movement (will not dig into or put excessive pressure anywhere). On your shorter backed horses, bar length is a consideration. A back tip of a bar that is too long will contact high up on the rise of the loin on these horses and be unable to settle down on the back, leaving a gap in the middle. A shorter bar that ends before that rise will sit down on the back better, so that could be part of a solution. Shortening the bar does decrease overall surface area though. That may be OK for a smaller and lighter rider, but there would be a limit to how short you would want to make bars for a larger rider for the sake of both the rider and the horse. Something else to consider is making sure there is enough "relief" built into the back bar tip so it doesn't dig into the loin. This essentially adds rock to the back of the bars. In looking at these horses, they do seem to have more rock in their back than is common, which would go with the "rise into the loin". In looking at the pictures of your mare as well as the other ones you have posted and ones on the Registry site, we see a horse with quite a round back, but also a relatively narrow back due to their smaller size. In horses overall, the narrower backs more commonly tend to be more angled, more A shaped. These horses also often have wither pockets that are more concave. The rounder back shape tends to be on wider horses, and the wither pockets here will often be flat or bulged outward. At least that is the basic generalization that is commonly made. This is why as the "standard" trees get wider, they also are generally given a flatter angle. The more narrow trees often have a steeper angle. You have a narrow horse that may need a wider angle. These things don't go together in an "off the rack" tree, resulting in the other signs you mention that basically show a real mismatch in shapes between the horse and the tree. It is good to recognize that horses with a more concave wither pocket will hold a saddle (stop it from sliding forward or back or side to side) better than ones with a rounded wither "pocket" in the same way that two spoons fit together better than two knives because there is a more definite shape to them that will hold them together. But if that is not the way the horse is built, you need to fit the horse as it is. The wither pocket on your mare is not concave. Therefore, what you don't want is a lot of side to side roundness to the shape of the bottom of the bar. Some companies have rounder bars, and some flatter. Some may offer a choice. You would want to choose a flatter "crown" shape for these horses, because too much roundness will put excess pressure in the center of that bar pad. A rounder crown on this wither pocket shape will also have less overall contact since the edges of the bar pad won't contact well. This would be like (I'm exaggerating, but it makes the point) trying to make two rubber balls "fit together". When you talk about the saddle moving forward, something to check out is what David calls "orientation". The line you drew on the stallion from the top of the croup to the top of the withers is horizontal, but that is not where the saddle fits. We look at the sides of horse's back where the bars sit. Is the loin area toward the back of the bars higher than the wither pocket area where the front bar pads sit? If so, (and it is commonly so), gravity will want to move the saddle forward unless something stops it. I can't see well enough on the stallion to see how it is, but if the mare is standing on a level surface, her back is a little bit "downhill", but not excessively so. If the tree fits the shape of her back well, those matching shapes would keep it place. Since you seem to be experiencing a spoon and knife mismatch in shapes, it will have a tendency to more forward with gravity. So overall, we feel that if the shape of the tree matches the shape of the horses back, it will stay put unless extraordinary (more than ordinary riding and roping) forces are put on it. If the shapes don't match, it is very likely to move around. On these horses, I could imagine a scenario like this: "typical" tree would have bars that would be a bit too long (or not have enough rock) to fit comfortably, so with every step the loin of the horse would push into the back of the bar, trying to push it forward, and causing pressure points. If the horse happened to be a bit downhill as well, gravity to help the saddle move forward. Meanwhile, up front, you have a rounder wither pocket area minimally contacting a possibly rounder front bar pad. So there is nothing there which would help the saddle to stay in place. And you may also have something that looks like an A (narrow tree, narrow angle) perched on top of a sideways C, or else a more flattened upside down V (wider tree, wider angle) with the edges sticking off in space with only the inside half of the bar contacting the horse because the bars are spread too far apart. So while you may have very little in the way of common shape to hold the saddle in place, you have lots of forces that work to move it around and cause pressure points on your horse. Basically, the typical combinations of width, angle, etc. don't fit. This in no way is to say that there is anything "wrong" with your horses. They just are not typical quarter horses, which was your point to start with. Fit is a combination of: width (spread between the bars), angle, the change in angle from the front to the back (twist), the amount of rock, the shape of the bottom of the bar side to side (crown), total bar length and length of the front bar tip. All of these things can be varied independently of each other. You don't have to do anything "weird" to the bottom of the bar to make a tree fit your horse. You just have to put uncommon (compared to typical quarter horses) combinations together: a narrower spread because the backs are narrow, not too steep an angle anywhere because they are round all down the back, enough rock on a shorter bar, especially at the back bar tip, and a flatter cup. We hope this helps you understand more of what areas we look at when we are asked to evaluate a type of horse for fit. It is hard to be sure with just pictures. Generally we get back drawings as well, and then spend time talking with the owner of the horses. So it would be good to get your response to our ideas. What do you think? As an aside, if anyone is sending pictures to a tree maker to help them see a horse's back better, here are a couple of things we hadn't mentioned earlier. It is helpful to send one side view that shows the whole horse, including the ground on which they are standing, such as the one of the stallion in the May 20th post. Ideally the ground is flat and level and the horse is standing square, but rarely do we get the ideal. This picture gives us a better view of how downhill or level the back is compared to a level surface. As well, it is good to have a person in at least one photo, and information about how tall that person is. That lets us see size of the horse better. Even if we have a weight and height in numbers, which is great, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Rod and Denise

Welcome, AZThunderPony. Glad to have you aboard. You have given a good verbal description of your breed, and it does sound like there are a number of things different enough that a tree made for a "typical" quarter horse would not fit easily on these horses. Something that would help a lot in getting a better idea of the shape of these horses' backs would be some pictures taken from different angles. One taken from behind and slightly above the horse so we can see the back side to side, and two others angled from about 45 degrees to the front and to the back of the horse would give us more of a 3D view. Is this a possibility? Are you looking for an English or Western saddle? You mention that all these pictures come from stallions. Do you have the same problems in fit with mares and geldings? Is it worse with the stallions? What specific problems have you had with previous saddles? Lots of questions to start out with, but that is generally our approach to figuring out a fit problem. The more information we have, especially pictures, the better we can figure out what would need to be done to fit your horses the best. Should be an interesting discussion.

Thanks for your reply David. You present some interesting ideas to consider. You talk about Jineta and Brida. I have a slight acquaintance with these terms. From what I understand, a "Jineta seat" would be one with the rider's weight balanced over both pin bones and more centered in the saddle, with their hips and head in a vertical line and their heels under them, so if the horse were removed from underneath them they would land in a standing position with slightly bent legs. This is what the saddle makers from the vaquero style strive for. A "Brida seat" would be one that put the weight of the rider at the base of the cantle with the feet further forward; more of a "chair" position. If the horse were removed from underneath them, they would fall backward to land on their butt. Is this a correct understanding of these terms, in your interpretation? Maybe because we make very few trees compared to the entire market and they go to people who hand make saddles, we deal with people who seem to think a lot differently than the regular "retailers" that you describe. I can only think of one saddle maker we have built the occasional tree for that would consider the "chair" type of seat to be at all desirable. (He has some other "different" ideas too.) All the rest of the custom saddle makers we know work to make a good seat of the "standing" type. The "chair" type of seat is what we commonly see in production saddles, though, as well as some custom ones. We think the advantages that a buyer gets in a hand made saddle should be mainly in two areas - better fit for their horses and better fit for themselves, which means a good groundseat. Fancy carving would be in addition to these two things, if you want it. (Now that would be an interesting discussion to read from different saddle makers - how to build a good groundseat.) As a tree maker, we feel that the fit for the horse is mainly our job. The saddle maker shouldn't have to make any changes to a tree to make it fit better, though they do need to give us good information about the type of horse this tree with be used on at the beginning. But the groundseat and fit for the rider is mainly the responsibility of the saddle maker. As I said before "A good saddle maker can make a good seat in any tree. It is just a bit harder in some than in others and that difficulty may have nothing to do with the width. And a poor saddle maker can make a bad seat in the best tree." Our job as a tree maker is to make the seat in the tree as much like the final seat in the saddle as possible so as to decrease the amount of time and effort the saddle maker needs to put in to make a good groundseat. If he wants to make a "chair" type of seat in one of our trees, he has to work hard to do it. I cringe when I read that jousting saddles used to be made with"two large arches whose purpose was to dig in to the horses back to stabilize the saddle". What a terrible thing to do to a horse. The purpose of the front bar pads (and the rest of the bar) on our trees are to help distribute the weight of the rider over as wide an area as possible, without interfering with the horse, so as to lower the amount of pressure in any one area and the overall PSI. There is an area on a horse that has a "good saddle back", as the old cowboys called it, where a slightly convex bar pad fits into a slight concavity behind the shoulders. That is the area we call the wither "pocket" - recognizing that in a lot of horses this area is flat or convex, filled with either muscle or fat as we discussed before. If the tree "digs in" anywhere something is very wrong. I can understand that new technology and computers could be a very valuable tool in designing and building trees. The truth is that we don't use a duplicating machine of any type. Our method of building trees is by marking all the parts with specific measurements that vary depending on what we are trying to do, and hand carving the individual parts to those measurements. The bars don't get turned out on a machine in a couple of minutes. They get individually made by hand. This explains the small number of trees we can build per year. It also explains how we can more easily handle special requests. We don't have to change any machines to do it. We just use a different measurement here and there. But we also have a choice in what we will and we won't do in meeting a saddle maker's request. If they want something like the shape of a fork to be different, fine. That is a personal preference thing that we can easily work with. But if they want to change something that we consider would change the functionality of our trees, we think long and hard about the request. We are always open to learning new things, and we have learned many things from good saddle makers. To just say no without knowing where the request is coming from and thinking about it would be foolish because then we would be thinking that we had cornered the market on knowledge. But when it comes to some areas, especially fit, we have (and use) the prerogative of saying no. (That is why we never have made and never will make an Arizona bar in our shop. And that is why the one maker who likes making the "chair" seat doesn't like the seat we put into our trees - and will continue to not like it. It won't be changed for him.) We have a totally different market than a large production tree company. We don't get saddle companies phoning us - we get individual saddle makers working out of small shops. We find when we talk with them about why we do what we do in the areas we don't want to change, they are generally willing to listen and consider what we have to say. Commonly, they haven't heard the information we have to give them, and once they know it, they can see where we are coming from and are OK with what we do. Often they are passing along a request from one of their customers and we try to help them explain to the customer why what they are asking for is not a good idea. If the customer is still adamant that they want something that we are not willing to do, they need to find a tree from another source. For us, that would be the loss of one order, and possibly one saddle maker. For a production company, it may be the loss of several thousand orders. I'm glad we don't have to deal with that. And I'm also glad that part of what we can do to help the industry is to let saddle makers know more of what we have learned over the years. Then they can decide if they want to agree or not, but at least they have the information. As far as the back tracings go, I really like the idea of having the topline curve put on a horizontal line the way you do it. That would really give you a good picture of how "downhill" or not a horse is. I also like the way you position the marks from across the back on the right matching with the topline drawing on the left. It gives a more easily seen mental picture of the horse's back. Maybe with your computer programs you can take these drawings, plug them in, and see things in 3D (that must be nice). But we don't have that availability, which is why we like the "side lines" we ask for. We feel it gives us a better mental picture. The idea of being able to "identify standard rib cage shapes" sounds intriguing. I guess I wonder if there are such things, or if there is just a continuum along which the changes go. If it is so, it would sure make fitting trees to horses a whole lot easier. But I can see the need to have computers and high tech stuff to figure that out, which is not our area at all. If you have the capacity to do that kind of research, that is great. I know it would be very valuable. I can also understand the possible advantages of choosing a point of anatomy rather than a point on a tree as your basis for where to take the cross drawings to give more consistency. I can see that consistency in the choice of the last rib since that doesn't change. But I wonder about the variance you get with measuring based on the point of maximum height or the base of the withers. On some horses, the withers go way back behind the shoulders. On others, they quit much futher ahead. Some horses have very tall withers and other very flat withers. And is the tallest point in the withers similar to the longest finger on people - it varies between individuals? These factors would make a difference between horses in where those lines are taken compared to the rest of the rib cage. Maybe you are able to account for these differences with your computer program. You say your tree is designed to sit further forward on a horse's back. Where do you expect contact to be with your trees? Would you be willing to explain more about why? Although I suspect there will always be areas about which we will choose to disagree with each other, I believe we think a lot more alike than may be evident at first glance. We are all trying to figure out how to make a saddle more comfortable for the horse, and to make a seat that enhances rather than hinders the rider with the result that they can communicate better and enjoy each other more. How we may do that is the difference. And there may never be a "right" answer.

Glad if we can help in some way. Sometimes the hardest thing to figure out is what question to ask. Often by the time we know the right question, we know most of the possible answers too. But some people who call us don't have a lot of knowledge yet, and as you said on another thread, there isn't a lot of information from tree makers out there. We figured that if this part of the forum is here to help people learn about saddles, maybe we can give our opinion on some things about trees that we have learned by our experience. We sure don't claim to know everything, and so many aspects of trees have no one "right" answer. Other people like doing things different ways for different reasons. I am rather curious as to what others think and why. I like the idea of breaking the tree into segments - for discussion purposes only of course! - and learning what others think and like. So much of the top of the tree is just personal preference so I am curious about what will come out of that. But let's stay with Bars and Bottoms for a while. We've had our say now. We really would like to hear what others have to say about it.

Still trying to figure out this picture thing. I am trying to put up the picture to go with the Arizona bars post responding to Blake. Here goes.

Bruce said "It has taken at least 10 years to think about it." Yup, sounds about right here too. (Well, maybe 11 ½ years since Rod started building.) I would also like to say here that making something to fit a specific horse is generally not a good idea. When we get back drawings, etc. of horses, they almost always fall within our normal parameters. We have only made two trees that were distinctly different from the "normal" (though we have one breed that is unusual that we make for.) In both cases, the owners were warned up, down and sideways that this tree would NOT fit a normal horse well and the owners were adamant that it didn't matter. They wanted a saddle for this horse and couldn't fit it any other way than having a tree made for it. For these two horses, they were right, and they had the finances to get a saddle for that horse. So we give people the information and let them make their choice. Most choose no. These two chose yes. So now, continuing on from where we left off¦ Rock: This is the part of the shape of the horse's back that can probably change the most. The rib cage can only expand so far as the horse takes a deep breath, so the angle and width of the bars don't change much for a horse once it is fully mature. Weight gain and loss can change wither pocket filling, but the underlying structure of the horse is the same. But how rounded or sunken a horse's back is can change dramatically depending on his age, how he holds himself at any particular time, and how he is trained and ridden. If he is "all strung out" the back will be hollow. If he is in full collection, his back will be rounder than when he is running freely. It is more difficult once you have a rider. You also have to take into account their weight, which causes downward pressure on the horizontal spine, possibly making it sag a bit. So there is a lot of discussion about what happens if you mount a horse and ask him to round up. We have an article where they checked out three makers of the high-tech type of devices that try to check out the pressure under a saddle. One said that a horse could round further under the weight of a rider compared to a standing back (the saddle would have more pressure under the middle), and two said it couldn't. It is obvious when a horse "sticks his tail in the ground" for a really hard stop on his hindquarters that the back of the saddle lifts off. He is very rounded for that very short period of time. If a horse is being ridden by someone who is asking for some degree of collection most of the time, his muscles will get trained to hold himself that way, and he may need less rock that he did before training. If a horse is ridden in such a way that his back is always hollow, his muscles will get trained to hold himself that way too, and bridging will be more of a concern. So what's a tree (and saddle) maker to do? Knowing a bit about the discipline the horse is being trained and used for may help a bit. Dude horses will not be moving in collection most of the time. (They also don't get custom saddles) Reining horses may be asked to stay collected a lot. We think the best guess is still to fit the standing horse (make sure he is standing square) and you probably won't be that far off when the horse is moving. And remember, because the horse is moving, we have quite a bit of leeway unless we are doing something really wrong. We fall on the "better have too much than not enough rock" side of the fence, if we have to pick a side. We think there are more horses with sore loins from bridging saddles than horses sore under the middle of the bar from too much rock (possible Arizona bar induced problems aside). How do we measure it to tell a tree maker? Answer - you really can't give a numerical measurement. There just isn't such a thing. A while ago there was someone who tried to make something that would give you a numerical evaluation of a horse's back, and it mainly dealt with rock. He had a gauge on the market that you would set on a horse You would maneuver the center "spine" of the device to match the topline of the horse, and then set a number of wings that extended sideways at angles to match the horse. You could determine the angles of all the joints and if both the tree maker and the person at the horse had the same system, you would give the numbers to the tree maker, he would set his device the same way and he could then see the shape. I couldn't find their website today, so I don't know if that is still available. It sounded like a good idea, but the limitations were the cost of the device, and the fact that the numbers only applied to the device, so you had to have one to know what it meant. There are a number of products available to make a mold of a horse's back which you can send to the tree maker, and they are helpful. Just make sure it is big enough for a western saddle. A lot are made for English saddles and just aren't long enough to show you everything you need to see. The thing that we have come to realize over the years is that the topline of the horse (which is set by how high the spines of the vertebrae are) doesn't always correlate with the amount of rock needed under the bar, which is sitting on the muscles overlying the rib cage. The rock in the bar extends from front bar tip to back bar tip, and where that sits on the horse is where you need to be looking to determine how much rock a horse needs, not the topline. This is why if we have back drawings sent to us, we have them draw at least three places across the back - in the middle of the wither pocket, across the stirrup groove area, and about the center of the back bar pad. A fourth line across the withers where the gullet lip would sit is also needed if tall withers are a concern. Then we get them to draw the topline and mark on it where the other lines cross it. Knowing what is truly horizontal by using a level on the back and transferring that to the drawing is helpful in knowing how "downhill" a horse is. If they do this, make sure the ground under the horse is level first! We also ask people to send us "side lines" from where the bar will actually be resting, from bar tip to bar tip, and extended forward over the shoulder. We ask them to mark on this "side line" where the lines across the back cross it. We feel this gives us the best representation of the shape we are trying to match. Pictures are also helpful, but can be deceiving based on lighting, etc. It really helps if people put masking tape on their horse first where they are going to take the back drawings, and then take pictures with the tape still on. Four views are good: from the side, the back, and angled from both front and back. We find that the tape really helps us see the shape of the back better, especially the "side lines". Bottom line, though, is the same old story. You have to see a tree from that maker and try it on horses to see how it fits. Then you know what you may want different for another tree. They know what they did to make it, so they can figure out how to change it to be the way you want it. Bar thickness and its relationship to shape: Having a thicker bar does keep you a little bit further off your horse, but that extra ¼" in thickness isn't a mile, and we see the advantages of thicker bars in a number of areas. So having thin bars just isn't a goal we aim for since we don't see a huge benefit in it. The disadvantage of thicker bars is that may they take more work to block the skirts. A thin bar is often narrower at the edges, making blocking skirts easier, but a thicker bar can also be made to have thinner edges to improve the ease of blocking the skirts. One big disadvantage of thinner bars is strength. The thinner the wood, the weaker it is, obviously. So thickness adds strength. (So does thicker rawhide, which is probably more important where strength is a major concern.) If the wood is thicker, it doesn't have to be as wide for the same strength, and that will help in building a narrower seat. Another disadvantage to thin bars is that it limits the amount of "relief" you can give to the edge of a bar. We use the term relief to describe the rounding off of the edge of the bottom of the bar so that it doesn't dig into the horse. You want relief at the bar edge, especially at the back bar tip. (When a bar tree is placed on a horse, we like to see the back bar tip come off the back. If it touches when unweighted, it will dig in with weight on it.) You don't want the edge to dig in anywhere. How much it might dig in depends on the shape of the horse and the over all shape of the bottom of the bar. For horses that are very muscular and whose back muscles bulge up from the spinal column and out from the wither pocket, this isn't a problem. You are fitting something that is the shape of a (slightly flattened) ball anyway, so the muscle will fall away from the bar edge anyway. You don't have to make it do that. (These are horses where you want an overall flatter shape to the bottom of the bar.) But for horses whose muscles are very flat, you want to gradually lift the bar edges away from that muscle so they don't stick in and hurt the horse, and that is where the relief comes in. (These are horses where you want a more rounded shape to the bottom off the bar overall.) If the bar is very thin, you can't build in much relief. If it is thicker, you can build in more. Flare is, in essence, extensive relief that starts further away from the edge and rises enough that it affects how you make the top of the bar as well, or else you would run out of thickness of wood before you got to the edge. The thinner the bar, the more the bar has to be "flared" to give the same amount of relief as you could with a thicker bar. The aim is to give surface area on the top of the bar for the saddle maker to use, but limit contact of the underside of the bar on the horse where it may interfere with his movements. If the bar is thick enough to provide a well rounded edge, the only area we see where interference may be a concern is at the shoulder. So long as the tree has enough rock, we haven't seen a need to flare the outside edge of the back bar pad. Maybe that is because of the relief we can build in. As Bruce's question implies, you are losing contact area in the flared section in order to avoid possible interference with the horse. We think the more surface area you have on the horse the better until you get to the point of interference. Where is that point? It varies with how the horse is built (how flat the shoulders, how far back they extend, how far he rotates them back, etc.), the discipline he is used for and the way he is trained. A gaited show horse that is being marked on the flashiness of its leg movement is asked to move its shoulders a lot and will need less possibility of interference than a ranch horse that is being roped off all day. But the ranch horse sure appreciates the extra surface area over which to distribute the pressure of that cow hitting the end of the rope, even if you dally. The idea of bar width (or depth) fits in here too. The wider the bar, the greater the surface area. But if it is "flared away" a lot it isn't contacting the horse, effectively making it a narrower bar. We don't see much point in having bar surface where it isn't contacting the horse as long as the saddle maker has enough to work with on the top. So if shoulder interference might to be a problem, our solution is to cut back the length of the bar tip so it doesn't extend forward over the shoulder, and with a thicker bar we can round the edge more than we could with a thinner bar, which helps with the full shoulder extension phase. A deeper (wider) bar increases the surface area on the horse to distribute the pressure better. This is the idea with Wade bars. They are wider than the others (comparing within the maker's bar styles and not between makers) because they were designed as ranch work saddles. But what about the "waist" area? If you are riding broad backed Quarter Horses, your knees will be further apart than if you are riding Thoroughbreds, no matter what the seat is like. All bars are narrowed where the rider's leg goes, and the narrower the middle, the easier it is for the saddle maker to make a narrow seat, but the less surface area there is on the horse, and the weaker the bar is. It is another one of those balancing acts. A good saddle maker can make a good seat in any tree. It is just a bit harder in some than in others (and that difficulty may have nothing to do with the width). And a poor saddle maker can make a bad seat in the best tree. So while having a "narrow waist" is nice, it isn't as important as the skill of the saddle maker in building the seat. As to the different wood used to make bars, there are three factors I can think of now that affect the choice of wood. The first is a very practical one - availability, especially in the size you need. It might be your first choice of wood for bars, but if you can't get it, you don't use it. The second factor would be properties of the wood. Strength is a hard thing to determine, because there are so many facets to it. Is a wood stronger because it takes more PSI to make it snap (like a hardwood such as maple) or because it can bend more before breaking (like fir)? Some woods break easily across the grain, but don't split lengthwise. Others are the opposite. Some may take more constant pressure before they break, but are more apt to split when tacks are hammered in. Screw holding ability also is a factor. The number of defects in the wood and the ease of cutting around them is a factor. And workability is a big one. The harder the wood, the harder it is to cut and shape. Some of the "old masters" could make a drawknife sing, but they used mainly pine in their trees. With the advent of carving discs, etc. the use of harder woods is now an option that they didn't have available to them with their tools. And let's face it, cost comes into play a bit too. If we are happy with either of two options, the lower priced one will be purchased. We like yellow poplar for the bars. It is available in a 2" thickness, and we have a supplier that lets us pick through a couple of lifts if need be to get the boards we want. While it is heavier than pine, it is about the same weight as fir (which we can't get easily), but it is substantially stronger. It is very difficult to break, and then it splits lengthwise, not across the grain. The charts say this is so, and in our own "torture tests" we have proved it to be true. We use several layers of 1" hardwood in the center of our wood post horn forks and a piece of 2" hardwood in our metal horn forks. Price determines that this is usually maple. We also like birch, and have used ash. We tried oak, but it can crack too easily for our liking. The cantle and the rest of the fork are made of aspen poplar. We can get kiln dried wood closer to home than the other woods. There are fewer knots and less gumminess than with pine. And the price is OK too. So those are our choices for now. I think that does it for this time. Again, please remember that every tree maker does things, and thinks about things, differently. These are just our ideas at this stage in our life.

Blake, regarding the ubiquitous use of Arizona bars in roping circles: It is hard to change how people think, but a question is "Why do they think the way they think, and do they know why they think the way they think?" Do they know what makes an Arizona bar an Arizona bar other than "this is a good bar for a roping saddle"? Some people won't change their minds for anything, but there are others who are open to reasonable explanations. It just takes time to educate them. We often have had to explain to people what an Arizona bar is. Even some saddle makers who call us don't know that an Arizona bar doesn't have a back stirrup groove, so your customers might not either. We have asked a number of people who know nothing about trees if they see a problem with putting a piece of leather under a bar, making a groove for it at the front but not the back, and then sitting on the tree when it is on a horse's back. Their response is generally, "Won't that make a lump at the back of that leather that will hurt him?" It is often obvious to someone who doesn't know that this is supposed to be a good thing, but hard to see by someone who has been told that it is. We have good pictures of the upper side of a set of skirts and the under side of a bar that had an Arizona bar tree in it, which I have attached below. You can see the area of pressure under the stirrup leather, and how it gets deeper towards the back. Then you see the area of total lack of pressure behind the stirrup groove for a bit, and the pressure gradually building back up again. If you get the chance to get some of your own pictures (or use the ones below, if I figure out how to attach them), it will let people see that what you are telling them is true. By the way, this saddle came to a friend's shop because the tree was broken - right where the back stirrup groove would have been if it had had one. Then we explain to people that the original reason for an Arizona bar was because of breakage at the back of the stirrup groove - the weakest place on the tree. Taking away the back groove left more thickness to the bar and so increased the strength. But there are other ways to make it strong - better wood, better rawhide, greater bar width. Show or tell them about the difference between a poorer quality tree without a stirrup groove and a better quality tree with one. This often is enough to convince them. (Of course, if a saddle maker is using trees that have thin pine bars with thin rawhide on them, the likelihood of breakage is still fairly high.) If you can get a couple of good ropers in your area using non-Arizona bars in their saddle, word of mouth may gradually change the ideas. But some people just won't change their mind. Making Arizona bars is the one major thing that we have decided we won't do because of the compromise we see in fit as a result. Fortunately, I don't think we have ever had anybody decide not to use us as a tree maker because we won't build them. If so, we haven't missed them. But I realize some saddle makers don't have the luxury of enough work to say no. (An elderly, very well respected saddle maker up here has a kind way of saying it: "I think another saddle maker would suit your needs better." He is one who has had the luxury of saying no for many of years.) As far as the full double rigging goes, if they are still listening to you at this point, they may be thinking that you know what you are talking about and be willing to listen to your opinions there too. Some people will listen to you, and some people could learn a lot if they didn't already know so much.

Thanks for adding to the list. Romey, You are not off topic. I think that was a lot of Dusty's point in his first post: the rider and the way the horse is ridden plays a big role in how the pressure on the horse's back is distributed, which is what saddle fit is all about anyway. Blake, Could you please expand more on how the trimming or shoeing affects saddle fit?

I don't know how long it took for Bruce to write his post, but this one has been on the go for a few days, and this is just part one in answering some of his questions. Lots of good questions and food for thought, and lots to learn by listening to others. Here is our current opinion, as tree makers, on the questions Bruce asked. We would invite (respectful) feedback, comments and questions on our ideas. All we can do is learn more. "Nothing is written in granite" should be the underlying theme when discussing trees, especially bars. We are trying our best to fit a solid object (unless you go with the flexible bar theory, which would be a whole different thread) on a softish, movable one. There will be no one "right" answer to the questions asked here. "How far from a great fit is no fit?" Our answer would be "A long way". "No fit" is one that hurts the horse. A great fit is harder, because what moment in time are you trying to fit the best? If you set a bare tree on a horse when he is standing still, you can see where it contacts him at that point. If you set it there and watch while he walks around, you will see that there is a lot of movement of the muscles of his back under the tree. There are times when the back will fall away from the tree so it isn't even touching at the back end of the bar and then the middle. As he turns the outside has less contact in places while the inside has more. The area where the bar fits into the wither pocket seems to be the only area that never loses contact between the tree and the horse. With weight on the saddle, you won't get as dramatic a visual difference, but the same factors are at play - the muscles will be having an increasing and decreasing amount of pressure with every movement and every phase of every stride. This is why we can "get away with" so much. There is rarely a constant enough area of high pressure anywhere under the tree to cause problems unless something is really wrong ("no fit"). The areas this constant pressure is most likely - the wither pocket and the back bar tips - are the areas we tend to see more problems. Bruce writes "Obviously some (tree makers) make bar patterns and have geometries that are different from others." I would change that slightly to say all are different. Even makers that learned from the same teachers modify and change things and think for themselves. Bottom line is that you cannot compare trees between makers based just on numbers and measurements. You have to see one from that maker and try in on horses. Then you will know what you want different next time. And you don't always have to change makers to get something different. If you ask, they often make them in the various permutations and combinations you want, but trying to explain all those options to you at one time is often too complicated to be practical for a first order, unless the saddle maker asks. Bottom line, once you know how one fits, talk to the tree maker. He can often make the changes you want for another tree. Bruce talks about the amount of "roundness" in the shape of the underside of the front bar pads - a very important factor which should match the shape of the horse. Some horses are A shaped with the sides of that A being concave. They hold a saddle in place the best, and need a rounder bar pad. Some are A shaped with the sides of the A being flat, and they need a flatter bar pad. Some horses bulge outward from either fat or muscle and that makes a difference in fit too. The problem with this "roundness" is that there is no number or measurement that can be used to describe it to someone who hasn't seen one of that maker's trees before. So for a first time order, the best you can do is describe the type (style) of horse you are trying to fit, to send back drawings, photos, molds, or whatever the tree maker asks for, and trust the tree maker to send his best shape to fit that type. Some tree makers make different shapes while maybe some offer only the one they feel fits the most horses. The method and equipment used to make the bars affects the ability to make different shapes a lot and plays a huge factor in what options are available. But basically you have to see one first, and then ask for changes if needed. (Sorry about that, but it's the truth.) "Hand hole vs. gullet width"? While repeating the statement, "you can't compare between makers", I would say that probably the most consistent thing that you could try to compare between makers would be the hand hole width. It always means that the inside edges of the bars will be the same distance apart. (Just check if that maker's numbers are in the wood or in the rawhide, which makes a difference.) If you just use gullet width, the inside edges of the bars can easily vary in their distance apart for two reasons - stock thickness (thickness of the fork front to back) and the way the bar tip is shaped. That being said, a maker may adjust for those factors so that gullet width can be used to compare between that maker's own trees. It does not compare well between makers. So order by what that maker uses as his standard to set bar width. He may or may not (the practical geometry gets very complicated) be able or willing to use the other measurement. "Should we specify both hand hole and gullet width and the bar spread along the bottom?" Our answer would be "No, please don't do that to us!" As I said before, the geometry gets complicated, but basically you are talking about a quadrangle with the hand hole (or gullet) width determining how wide the top line is, the two bars sloping outward forming the sides, and the bar spread along the bottom forming the bottom. Any and all of these sides and angles can be adjusted in different ways (but necesssarily evenly side to side!) There are two factors that are not mentioned here that affect the spread along the bottom of the bar (and where and how does everyone like to measure that?) compared to the hand hole or gullet width: 1.) The angle at which the bars are placed (discussed later) and 2.) The depth (or width) of the actual bar, which I rarely hear discussed. That would have to be measured in a way that is precisely the same on all the trees but everything is so rounded and shaped by the time the bar depth is determined that I have yet to find a consistent place to measure it that would be useable to compare between makers. Does anyone do this regularly? What is your preferable way to measure bar depth? We can tell you what the spread at the bottom of our bars is at various places along the bar based on the hand hole width, bar angle and bar type (which determines the depth or width of the actual bar) on our trees. But to try and make that fit some arbitrary numbers given to us based on someone else's trees - practically that is a no go. There are enough other differences between maker's trees that you wouldn't get the same fit anyway, even if you did want to pay us for the time and effort it would take to get it figured out (and even IF - that's a big if, by the way - we were willing to do so). Maybe math PhDs and computer programmers can do it a lot easier, but that's not us. All that being said, the bar spread at the bottom is another measurement that may be very helpful in comparing trees - within one maker's styles, depending on other factors. Between makers - different story. Arizona bars - our take is that we have decided that we won't make them. They may or may not cause problems depending on the way they are made and how well the rock in the bar fits the rock in the horse's back. But we are comfortable enough with the strength of the materials in our trees that we are not worried about breakage at the stirrup groove, so we see no necessity to remove that back stirrup groove - in our trees. Our main reason for not making them is that however they are made, we feel that you compromise fit. You either have a stirrup leather lump under the bar against the horse, or you lose bar surface area behind the stirrup where the bar is hollowed out a bit to avoid problem number one. Remember, please - "Every tree maker does things differently." In another thread Blake said that he would go with Arizona bars in arena or hard roping ranch horses, depending on the event. I am curious as to why. Is it a strength factor or is there something about the fit that you feel works better in those events? I am not quite clear on how arbitrarily narrowing the width of the cantle gullet would account for twist. Bruce, are you talking about what David Genadek calls orientation? Downhill horses are the bane of a tree (and saddle) maker's existence. They fall into the category of horses that are not properly built to carry a saddle. So how do we deal with the problem? I see fixes at three levels. 1.) The best one is the horse - breed them level!!! But quarter horses are often sold on the basis of their "big butts", according to the ads anyway, and a butt looks bigger if it is taller than the front of the horse, so that is still how they are being bred. Hopefully we are close to the end of the pendulum swing and we will see more level horses in the coming years. (To encourage this, might I suggest getting the owner to ride in a normal, flat seated saddle for a fair distance - long enough that they get so tired of sliding into the fork that they decide to geld the stud or spay the mare? But no, that wouldn't be fair to the horse.) 2.) The tree. My best understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is that David works on this problem by spreading the back of the bars further apart than the front of the bars so the back will sit down lower compared to the front. I can see how this would work well if you also changed the shape of the bar and the angle of the back of the bar (by altering the twist) to fit the horse further out from the spinal column. To just spread the bars as is wouldn't work well. But how far out to spread would be dependant on how downhill the horse was, and every different amount of spread would require different shape and angle. If that is what David is able to do, good for him. But it would be technically very difficult, and for some severely downhill horses, it just wouldn't be possible to reach the ideal. You would run out of practical width of horse before you run out of downhill!! (Unfortunately, I sometimes see horses this severe advertised with stud fees attached. Ouch.) 3.) The ground seat. You fit the tree so it fits the shape of the horse's back as if it were level, and then build the ground seat higher in the front to level out the seat. Then the weight of the rider wouldn't be pushing the saddle down the hill so much. This is very possible for a custom saddle maker to do, especially since he has a greater chance of seeing the horses on which the saddle will be used than the tree maker does, and can make the ground seat accordingly. How wide or narrow should the channel between the bars be (at the back I am assuming)? Good question. A channel can be too narrow so that it puts too much pressure too close to the bones of the spine. But how wide is too wide? One difficulty of having a wide channel comes for the saddle maker in putting in a ground seat to cover the wider distance - more of a problem for leather ground seats versus tin. A second disadvantage is that the further apart the bars go, the higher the cantle gullet needs to be to clear the spine. This can be a problem for a short cantle. You may not have enough wood left between the top of the cantle gullet and the top of the cantle for strength. Another difficulty is trying to make a narrow seat on a wider tree. If you spread the back of the bars apart, you will make the tree wider. Even if you change the angle to match the steeper angle on the horse's side further away from the spine, it will still be wider unless you narrow the depth of the bar, which decreases surface area. Balancing all these factors fits into the "Every tree maker does things differently" category. Bar angles. We hadn't heard yet that 93 degrees was now "celebrated". (Maybe it takes a while for the news to travel north.) A few years ago the word in some places was that it was "bad, bad, bad". But no one angle is right for all horses any more than one width or one shape is. And wrong angles probably cause more problems than wrong widths. The real truth is the numbers actually don't mean much when comparing between makers. Honest. Within every maker's trees, a 93 degree will be wider at the bottom for the same hand hole (or gullet) width than a 90 degree. But you can't compare one maker's 90 degree with another maker's and expect them to fit the same for a number of reasons too complicated to go into right now. (There is another information article that has been floating around in my head for about 2-3 years on that topic. Maybe it is getting ready to be written sometime soon.) Again, as a saddle maker, the bottom line is that you need to get one tree from a maker and see how it fits. Then talk with the tree maker about how you would like to adjust things for other. Chances are, they can do it, or they have their reasons why they can't or won't. Communicate. It's worth it. Enough for now. My brain hurts. And I see that as I am agonizing over how to make myself clear, Bruce is asking questions faster than I can give my opinion on them. There's lots to discuss, isn't there? But this is our two cents worth, for whatever two cents is worth today. (Just to be perfectly clear, while I (Denise) actually type the stuff, Rod has his say on the content. We work together on things. It's more fun that way!!)

Thank you all for the welcome. We do appreciate that. Bruce is correct when he says that there isn't a lot of information coming from tree makers. Speaking from the position of someone who hand crafts saddle trees, there are probably a number of reasons for that. One would be that most tree makers we know tend to be relatively solitary people. They don't get a lot of phone calls. They don't work out of store fronts so they don't have people stopping in to visit. They just spend day after day out working in their shops - alone. And they like it that way!! As well, none of the hand crafted tree makers we know of are looking for new customers. That is why if you go on the internet looking for them, there is a severe dearth of information. The saddle making world is a small one, and the people who want to buy this type of tree do all the tree makers advertising for them by word of mouth. No websites needed. With most of the hand makers turning out between 80 and (an incredible) 200 a year, and a lot of the guys who build on these trees having wait lists of months to years, no one needs to take the time to advertise or give out information. They just need to stay in the shop and build! Another reason is that tree making has a lot of technical aspects which are very hard to explain in writing, and can be easily misinterpreted. It is hard enough to show someone who is with you some of these things. Getting it across in words is extremely difficult. There also may still be some of the old school of "don't let anyone else know your trade secrets", but we haven't really met with that. The tree makers we have met and talked with have been open to share how they do things once they know you are really looking to understand how they think and not abuse the information they give you. But maybe the biggest reason is one expressed to us by another maker that we met at Sheridan a few years ago who also makes his living hand building trees. He said something to the effect of, "As soon as you seem to know something, someone is out there to take shots at you and knock you down. I don't need that, so I just keep quiet and build trees." That is why our website was supposed to be (we were originally told by Telus) non-Google-able. And it wasn't - for about three months. Then it appeared. Such is the internet. It was started to be an information site that was easier, faster and (lets face it) cheaper than mailing out photocopies of our articles as we have been doing for years. The articles started out when I (Denise) heard Rod explaining the same thing over and over to saddle makers on the phone. If figured that if they had something in writing, maybe with pictures, it would be easier to understand. We started with one (that has been reworked multiple times by now) and they have gradually grown over the years. Then one of our customers said, "You can't get this information anywhere else. Why don't you get it published?" That was the incentive behind the LCSJ articles. If there is one thing you may hear from us over and over again, it is that "Every tree maker does things differently". Our articles apply to our trees and the way we do things, and can't necessarily be extrapolated to others. The numbers given definitely don't apply elsewhere. There are often multiple ways to approach a problem, and multiple ways to solve it. Giving one answer on how we solved it may be interpreted as meaning that the other ways are not as good or wrong, which is not what we want to do. And hence the trepidation in saying anything at all. It is easier just to keep your head down and build trees. But we also enjoy helping people understand more about trees. It is fun to talk to saddle makers and hear their opinions, learn from their experiences, find out what unusual requests they have had recently and maybe figure out how to do something different to fill them. We enjoy hearing the different accents on the phone and finding out how the weather is all over North America. (Maybe we aren't as solitary as we like to think.) This forum thing is brand new to us. We still need to learn the etiquette and rules, not to mention the technical stuff on how to post. But maybe we can help someone in some way. Or maybe we will just confuse everyone totally. So please, for whatever we post, please remember the disclaimer - "Every tree maker does things differently."

To try to compile what has been said here: 1.) The reason we even talk about saddle fit is that we are all concerned that we don't hurt the horse because we ride him, and that we want our equipment to avoid getting in his way to let him do his job the best he can. 2.) The things that have been mentioned that can affect the fit positively or negatively are: The rider - how they sit, their size and weight The padding - dirty, wrinkled, amount The horse - his condition, his age, the way he uses his body (collection, straightness, etc.), a build that cannot properly carry a saddle The saddle - ground seat construction and orientation, rigging position and straightness The cinch - size, materials The tree - bar types, sizes, orientation, etc. (The bar factors are being looked at on the Bars and Bottoms thread.) Playing the diplomat, I would agree that everyone is right in these things. They all play a part in "not hurting the horse". To this list, I would also add: Cinching way too tightly for way too long. Sitting for long periods on a horse without allowing him to move, which can happen at ropings, clinics, etc. This can have the same effect on his back that sitting on a hard wooden bench for hours without being allowed to wiggle a bit has on your butt. Accessories such as breast collars or cruppers used incorrectly to hold the saddle in a position for which it was not intended. My question for everyone would be: What other factors or influences of these factors have other people seen to cause problems with saddle fit?

It is interesting what you can find sometimes when you Google your name. This time we found someone saying that none of our trees would fit a real horse. On another thread there is another person saying that saddle fitting doesn't have much to do with the saddle. And there are a couple (thank you) who appreciate our efforts to communicate some information. It is with a bit of trepidation that we have decided to post here, but we felt that we did want to respond from our viewpoint. Just to let people know more about where we are coming from - Our web site was originally set up so we could direct our customers to it. We wanted to communicate more easily with our customers, to explain how we build our trees, why we build them the way we do, and how we think about saddle trees (and life). Our information articles come from our opinions, based on our experience and the information we have gained over 11 years of hand crafting individual saddle trees as a full time profession. We enjoy learning more, which is why we keep detailed records on each and every tree we build, why we have a library of different horse's back shapes, and why we listen to saddle makers. We also enjoy helping others who are interested to learn more, or at least think about things from a different view point, whether they agree with us or not. This was the purpose of our website. Rod comes from a working cowboy background, and while we build for many different types of horses and uses, a fair proportion of our trees go into working rigs all over North America. These saddles are used hard, for long hours, by people who make their living on horse back. The comments we receive back are consistently positive, and we are thankful for that fact. If our trees work for these guys, we know they will work for the pleasure riders too. A big part of running a small business is knowing who your customers are. What does this person want to accomplish with their riding? Some people just enjoy being with their horses and pleasure riding. They don't generally ride for great lengths of time or ask a lot of their horses. (They also don't generally order custom saddles, unless they have way too much money.) Some people want to build their horse into the best athlete and partner he can be in whatever discipline they prefer. They tend to ride each horse for relatively short time periods (often less than an hour), but they ride intensely, concentrating on their horse and his body, asking him to be as specific as possible in the maneuver they are working on at all times. (They may want a custom saddle specifically geared to their discipline. Most of the specifics would have to do with the top of the saddle, though riding a horse which is always being asked to move in collection makes a difference on the bottom side too.) A lot of our customers don't go out to ride with the sole intention of spending time with their horse, or building their horse into the best athlete and partner he can be. That is part of what they do (and some do it very well), but it is often a side benefit. The main goal is generally to check that 15 miles of fence, round up a few hundred head of cattle, or get those cows doctored for foot rot. The horse's back will change shape with every one of those hundreds of steps he will take in that four to twelve hour period. Sometimes his hind end will be underneath him and he will round up more, especially if he needs to turn quickly. Sometimes he will be going flat out to get past that cow. Sometimes he will be asked to concentrate hard on his job, and sometimes he will be allowed to relax as he moves between more intense jobs. This is the horse and rider we build for. That is why we use the wood we do, the thickness of hide that we do, and the construction techniques that we do. (We don't say that you can't break one of our trees, but we haven't had a broken one come back yet. We do say if you do break one, we want to hear the story, because it will be entertaining!) That is also why we build our trees to fit the way they do. It is very true that the closer the shape of the entire bar is to the shape of the horses back the more stable the saddle will be. But it is the wither pocket that is the best area of the horse's back to hold the saddle in place when a 1000 lb animal at the end of the rope tries to pull it sideways. We build trees so the front bar pad fits into the wither pocket behind the shoulder (without interfering with the shoulder). This then determines where the rest of the tree is positioned on the horse's back, which dictates the shape of the bars, with all their variables. We work hard to fit the shape of the horse with our starting point as the wither pocket. But since every tree maker does things differently, even if they position their tree in the same place on the horse's back, they will all be somewhat different in their basic fit, and the trees need to be seen to be evaluated. A tree that is made to be placed in a different spot on a horse's back will have bars that are shaped very differently because they are made to fit a different area of the back. A tree that is made to accomplish a different purpose may or may not be shaped differently again. It is not that one shape or place on the back is right and one is wrong. They are just different, because they are being used for different purposes. We sure don't claim to corner the market on knowledge. But we do have a lot of experience and a lot of satisfied customers. And our customers are not just the riders but the (generally) more knowledgeable saddle makers, some of whom have been building for many years and are highly regarded in their field. So to read that someone who, to our knowledge, has never seen one of our trees, let alone tried it on a few horses, bluntly condemns us, saying that we are "way off" and that "none of (our) trees will fit a real horse" is disturbing, to put it mildly. It also pushes the boundaries of "not using this bulletin board to post any material which is knowingly defamatory, inaccurate or abusive" as stated in the Forum Rules and Terms. It is fine to have strong opinions and to state them. Let's just state them as such and be respectful in the way we do it. It will be interesting to continue to read some of the topics here. Bruce's idea of getting ideas and opinions of the different parts of the tree is a great one. Lots of good questions and discussion starter in that first post in Bars and Bottoms. It will be interesting to see where it goes. I am sure we can all learn.