Rod and Denise Nikkel

We build saddle trees full time. Rod started the business just over 13 years ago, and I joined in full time 10 years ago. Prior to that Rod worked ranch jobs, rode pasture and feedlots, and was in charge of the horse herd and riding program at a camp (which is where we met). He finally got tired of building other people's empires for poor pay and decided to start his own business. Best job related decision he ever made. I am a retired veterinarian (it is nice to retire in your 30s!), having worked farm animal and small animal practices. Never did much with horses as a vet though. Go figure...

Margaux, First off, it's Rod, not Ron. Common error, but we don't want it getting more common. Because Dennis’s system isn’t telling us how to build a tree. It is simply describing the shape of a horse, and horses are curved. WE decide how we want to fit that shape. Which angle do we measure? Good instruction to start with and then experience. Lots of trees on lots of horses, on bare, with weight, with padding, moving around, looking, evaluating, feedback from customers riding the saddles. I'm not saying we never fiddle with our patterns here and there. We do. But nothing drastic because when the basics are correct, they WORK. And we started out with correct basics.

Margaux, Your picture explains perfectly why we don’t “mirror image” a fit. I am in no way disparaging your thinking or yourself, but honestly, it is the people who have the least experience with real trees and real horses that are most concerned with making a mirror image fit. Here is a thread about the plastic mold for the back. http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=519 (I like the “which side of the mold do you want me to fit?” quote.) Believe me, there are systems galore out there that have tried to do this. Peg boards and angle gauges and calculations, etc. etc. What a lot of people don’t understand is that these things HAVE been taken into account in the design of the tree. When you spend a lot of time alone in the shop carving wood or leather, you have lots of time to THINK. And we do! None of these questions or ideas are new, but they cause confusion for people. This forum gives us a place to try to explain, as best we can, why we do what we do the way we do. Then it is up to the reader. Here is a picture of 90 degree angles over each other. It doesn’t matter how high you go, they still always fit on each other. They just get higher and higher (and more unstable) compared to the lowest one. Here is a picture of the front of one of our trees. You are not looking at in inwardly curving surface as your drawing shows. You are looking at an angle with curves in it. This tree will sit higher or lower on a horse depending on their width (and the volume of padding) but it won’t dig in at the bottom as your picture shows because of the relief built into the edges as part of the design of the bar. If the angle is wrong, THEN you can run into problems. (This is where Dennis’s system helps us know, not guess, the shape we are fitting.) But the padding doesn’t change the angle. Here is a picture of the back of one of our trees. Same thing. Here are two pictures (tried to get them as close as possible in the picture. Not perfect, but good enough? ) of the back bar pads of the tree pictured above lined up on a D8 (wide) pattern at the C position drawn from Dennis’s cards. This is the fit we would choose for this size horse. The first on is from the card itself. This one is from a line drawn an inch (measured!) above the original drawing. Now you may look at that and say “But it is barely contacting! The bottom edge sticks out into space and the top is nowhere near the horse.” etc. etc. But now add some weight to this saddle. Muscle is soft and compresses. Padding compresses too. That tree, when ridden, will contact with most of its surface area but the edges still will not dig in. If you had it shaped so the tree matched closer to the drawn shape, when you put weight on it, or asked the horse to turn, those edges would cause problems. This is the “art” of the tree design. How much relief to build in and where. I hesitated to put this up those last two pictures because people can copy the picture, fiddle with it in a computer program and then say “Well, I’d change it by 3.72 degrees so it would fit much better than that.” But, as everyone who is on here with much experience is saying, it doesn’t matter that much. The horse will gain and lose weight. The rider may weigh 90 lbs or 250 lbs. The padding will change, etc. etc. etc. The bottom line is – if the design of the bars is such that 1.) it doesn’t dig in anywhere and 2.) it gets as much surface area on the horse as possible, IT WILL WORK. And by work, I mean distribute the rider’s weight over as much surface area as possible and not create pressure points. It really is that basic.

Margaux, You may be sorry you asked… And since it took me a long time to write it, others have chimed in since. First, we started with good patterns and good teaching from the guy we learned from. "We are where we are because we stand on the shoulders of giants." Next, over the years we have done what people have done for centuries - put different sizes of our trees on a bunch of different horses and see how they fit. And the test of how well our decisions were made is how do they work when made into saddles? So between good teaching, years of observation, and feedback from our customers, we have learned empirically that this combination of measurements works well on this type of horse. When someone would send us back drawings, we would do the same thing - figure out which measurements fit best on the drawings in front of us by comparing the templates to trees we had on hand or to templates we had taken of horses we had seen and decided on fit. When Dennis's system came out, we took out his cards and our trees to a bunch of horses and compared: this horse, these numbers off the cards, this size of tree – and made the correlations. So we now know what measurements on our trees fit with a given combination of numbers off the cards. This is as objective as we can do at the moment, and the "art" to it is learning to see how the bare tree sits and know how it will work in actual use. (That said, Dennis's system is extremely helpful in being able to compare specifically and easily between horses and thus it helps us in seeing the differences better.) .If we are given back drawings or Dennis Lane system numbers, we don't build a tree for a horse "kinda like that". But we do build a tree for that "kinda" horse. Your horse has a basic body type that thousands of others out there (unless you have a very bizarre horse) also have and that type is what we work to fit. Dennis's system has just made it a whole pile easier to really know what type your horse is. We had a customer drop by today to ask some questions, so we pulled our horse out of the pasture and started throwing different sized trees up on him. Now Gus has what we think of as a good back. A good back to a tree maker is one that is easy to fit – not too extreme in any direction – flat or round, wide or narrow and with a decent wither. It was interesting to see the diversity of tree sizes that would work on him, one being ideal and the others being workable ie. they didn't dig in anywhere and wouldn't interfere, but they had less surface area in contact with him than the ideal tree did. So, if we were asked to build a tree to fit his body type, would we randomly choose any of the ones we tried on today? No. We would build the ideal size. If your horse's body type is more extreme (and those muscular barrel shaped horses that are totally round everywhere are "extreme" even if they are common) then your options when "buying off the rack" are a lot more limited. But as a custom maker, we do the same thing for that horse as we would for our Gus – fit that body shape as ideally as we can. (And mutter under our breath about horses not being bred to carry saddles these days.) Rod's short answer: Do we make calculations to account for this? No. Does that mean it is not accounted for in the bar patterns we use? No. The patterns do take this into account. Denise's verbose answer: We understand what you are saying about the padding affecting the fit but honestly, unless it is excessive, we don't feel it makes enough of a difference that we have to change what we do about it. If you had a flat counter top and added 1" to it, the same flat tray would still fit on top. If you had two nestled dessert bowls and added an inch pad between them, it would affect how they fit together. A horse's shape is closer to the flat counter top than the dessert bowl, and the amount of difference a 1" pad makes on the relatively shallow curves on a horse's back is not significant if the correct allowances are made for relief at the start. What I am saying is that the basic bar patterns we start with takes into account the fact there will be skirts and sheepskin and reasonable padding under the bar. If we had our druthers, the maximum pad thickness would be an inch. If you have a good fitting tree with adequate surface area already, we don't feel you need more than that. The people who have their 2 – 4 inches of padding are negating the fit of the tree. It would be like ordering custom boots but telling the guy you want to wear 8 pairs of socks inside them. He isn't going to need to be very exact in making the boot because all those socks obliterate the curves in the foot. You are correct in that honestly, we don't often ask about padding when we build a tree (unless they are in a discipline that tends to overpad as a rule). Some saddle makers will tell us "this guy really pads up a lot" and then we sit and discuss how unnecessary it is and how it wrecks the fit of a good saddle. And we may make the fit a bit larger than we normally would for the type of horses the guy usually rides. But the people who use 4" of padding are not usually going to be going for Dennis's system either. And – opening a huge can of worms – the type of pad used is just as important as, if not more important than, the thickness in how it affects fit. And neither thickness nor type do we have any control over, and they WILL change with most of the riders out there. But if someone wants to be specific and give us that information, that's great. (If they want to listen to our suggestions, we like that even better. ) Building a saddle tree isn't like tapping a hole for a 3/32"" screw in metal where you can get an exact fit. A lot of the problems people have experienced come from using poorly designed saddles. They don't know how well a properly designed saddle works, so they look for that elusive "perfect fit" with all sorts of methods and (sorry to say) gimmicks. There is so much movement of the horse under the saddle, and so many other factors that affect how the saddle fits that we really feel there is a place called "good enough", and there isn't a place called "perfect". Not for more than a few seconds anyway. So we don't feel it is a cop out to say "good enough". That means GOOD – low PSI under all every part of the bar in contact with the horse – and ENOUGH - aiming for perfection in a constantly changing system is like grabbing at clouds. If cowboys can ride these things for hours at a time over all sorts of terrain on one horse, rope and doctor a bunch of sickies, including mature animals, and bring their horses home without sore backs, we're happy. And that is what our customers tell us their customers tell them. PS. We enjoy your sense of humor.

A lot of people seem to have the idea that in order to fit a horse, a saddle tree must be a mirror image of their back. May I paraphrase your question to make sure I understand it. Are you asking, "How do you make a mirror image of a back plus skirts and padding when you only have the image of the back to work from?" Is this correct? If so, then the answer is that we are not trying to make a mirror image of the horse's back. If you do that, you will end up with pressure points and interference with the horse when he moves. What we are doing is fitting the basic shape of the back and keeping the two rules: 1.) Don't dig in anywhere (build in adequate relief on the edges and tips). 2.) Have as much surface area as possible on the horse without breaking rule #1 (have the basic shape right so you don't create pressure points by having too much rock, too little rock, too much crown or just too small a bar for the weight of the rider). This is why you don't need 52 different varieties of tree fits, nor do we want to have a saddle specially made for every individual horse. There is a range or segment of horse shapes that can use one "size" of tree without breaking rule #1, but they will have varying amounts of surface area in contact with the horse. So while some of those horses have a more ideal fit than others, the tree will still work OK on them IF you have enough surface area on your bars to start with. You can run into problems with rule #2 when the PSI gets too high due to very small bars that may not break rule #1, but that is not as common a problem. When you get outside that range of horses, you break rule #1 (too narrow a tree and the bottom edges of the bar dig in, too wide a tree and it falls forward and puts too much pressure on the inside of the bar edge up front, etc. etc.) That is when you need a different tree. But you can have a tree that works well for a horse, and the way the saddle is built on it can mess up the fit. Or you can have a saddle that would work well and the way it is placed on the horse (and held in the wrong place via breast collars, etc.) messes up the fit. Or you can place a good saddle properly on a horse and the padding can mess up the fit. Or you can place a good saddle in the right place with good padding on a horse and the rider can cause pressure points by the way he rides. The tree maker has no control over any of these things (unless he also builds the saddle). If a tree fits a horse well with a ½" or 1" pad, it will work OK with 2". If it is on the edge of the range of good fit with a 1" pad, it may not work with 2" of padding. But if a guy decides he needs 4" of padding, he better not complain to us that the tree doesn't fit. That is above and beyond the realm of the allowance we can, or will, build into the tree. At least, that is our take on the question. Others may think differently, of course…

Oldtimer - Would you post pictures of both? Love to see what these look like!

Ditto to Greg, Alan and JW.

Good quality 100% wool - period.

Well, we're sitting at -28 C (about -20 F) at the moment and I don't want to know about wind chill. Fortunately I have no where to go today so can just stay warm at home.

Both. We discuss what we want to say and I (Denise) often do the typing. If something is from Denise alone, I use my alter ego - Denise - to post it. There are no names or categories for body types. We have built hundreds of trees based on verbal descriptions only. To be a bit more specific, we used to use back drawings as we described on our website. Dennis Lane's system has made that much easier. www.dennislane.com.au The principles of saddle fit don't change, regardless of what the saddle is used for.

Mort, we never even attempt to fit a BREED of horse. We fit a BODY TYPE - wide, narrow, round, angled, etc. Horses are horses. Breeds have been developed by humans who like to think they make a difference, but overall there is often more variation within a breed that between breeds. So as far as fit goes, it doesn't matter what the tree will be used for. The principles of how you fit a horse don't change.

Exactly. And when you make the pattern to allow relief on the edges, etc. that you need to do to keep Rules #1 and 2, you are no longer making an “exact fit” for the horse. What you have made is a tree to fit a body type that will work on other horses of the same body type. And because horses move under the saddle, the pressure is constantly changing in different areas, which is why you don’t need to worry about having a specific tree for every horse. Just fit the body type. Where you run into problems is when two bodies are different enough that you break Rule #1 by using the same saddle on both of them. That is why most trainers have 3-4 different saddles maximum – because that range will fit the vast majority of what they are riding. Mort, this isn’t as complicated as you seem to think it is. But neither is it as simple as buying “QH tree” expecting to fit a QH or an “Arabian” tree expecting it to fit all Arabians. And to be absolutely clear, there is no such thing as an “industry standard” in the saddle business. The names used in the industry today are meaningless, as has been stated many times. This is not what we are talking about when we speak of the body type of a horse.

Mort, I think you are trying to reinvent the wheel here. (After all, Newton only understood gravity and gave it a name. He didn’t invent it! ) I agree there are a lot of wobbly, weak, oblong and even square wheels out there in the saddle tree world, but there are round, strong and balanced ones too. There are good patterns that fit horses being used today. Those are the guys with the long waiting lists. Things like pressure pads can tell you IF there are pressure points, but they can’t tell you WHY they are there. There are many factors that come into play. The pressure pads can be an excellent research tool, but the interpretation of the results is what matters. Just because there is a red spot doesn’t always mean X. It may mean Y, Z, A, B, C, etc. etc. and that is where the practical, experiential knowledge of horses and saddles and trees comes into play. To answer your questions: Our business was based on building for working cowboys and I would say that over half our current output goes to working guys that use them hard on a daily basis. If they didn’t work well for these guys’ horses, we wouldn’t still be in business. (These guys also tend to have horses that have good backs to start with. We agree with Greg’s point.) In almost 13 years and over 1600 trees, we have yet to have one come back broken. I can’t say for sure that none have broken, but we have not seen them, and we’ve heard some interesting wreck stories. I repeat – quality of materials and construction techniques make a difference - in fit as well as strength. Please don’t misunderstand and think I am trying to brag up our trees in particular. There are other makers whose names you have heard (some who are members here) that do the same thing as we do. “We can see what we see because we stand on the shoulders of giants.” It doesn’t matter if they are English, Australian, Western or whatever - the “problem of saddle fit” disappears if you follow into two simple rules: 1.) Don’t dig in anywhere - no excess pressure points 2.) Spread the weight - adequate surface area. This is why we don’t shape bars to fit a mold from horse’s backs. If you do, the horse is going to break Rule #1 very quickly - as soon as he moves. Like every other tree maker we have talked to, in “real life” or on this forum, we work to fit a body type, not a specific horse. What has been missing in the industry is a standard way to describe the body type of the horse. Dennis Lane’s system looks to have the potential to fill this void depending how it may be used. Then people could figure out the body type of horses they want to fit and buy saddles made to fit those body types. (And the tree and saddle makers still can have their one opinion on how a saddle SHOULD fit that body type, so every tree maker will still be able to do things differently. ) If all the horses you own are one body type, you need one saddle. If you have a number of body types, you may need more than one saddle. However, if the tree is built with adequate relief at all the edges and lots of surface area, then there will be some overlap between body types where the tree still does not dig in anywhere and still has adequate, though not full, surface area on the horse. The other thing that is still missing in the industry is the “quicker and more affordable” way to make a tree. The methods we use to build a tree do not lend themselves to factory production. The patterns we use, however, might. But, as I said before, we won’t be the ones to go that direction.

Mort, It looks like you have been researching the net extensively. Looking at the site the pictures come from explains the rather different conformation and hardware on those trees. I couldn’t figure out why there was a bolt extending at least ¼”, if not more from the looks of it, though the bar in the first picture. That would damage a horse to uselessness in the first few seconds of a ride if used as is. So in looking at their site, this tree would probably have been designed and built for them specifically to use as the solid part of the tree to which they are attaching their flexible panels. It would not have been one of the tree company’s own designs. That would also probably explain why it split through the fork and cantle and not the bars which is generally the weakest part of a tree. The idea of flexible panels very similar to these under a solid tree was a concept that Orthoflex saddles used a number of years ago. The company is no longer in existence as far as we know. The original Trooper saddles had rigid trees. The suspension has to do with the seat for the rider, not the bars on the horse. The problem that must be overcome in a saddle is that rigid must contact flexible at some point. With a rigid tree, that interface is under the whole surface of the bar, spreading out the pressure. With a panel system or with flexible bars, that rigid/flexible interface is at whatever connection points there are between the two – either the attachment point of the panels, as in the first site, or at the ends of the arches, as in the second site you list, or the attachment points of the bars and fork, as in a lot of flexible bar trees today. These connection points have concentrated pressure under them – and that can sore the horse. Also, if bars are able to be easily bent with arm pressure, they will sag under a rider and not distribute their weight evenly across the full bar surface. The only advantage I could see to carbon fiber would be its weight to strength ratio for recreational saddles. All the other problems of producing a tree and getting it to fit properly are the same as with any other material. We have heard that building on these trees is not easy, but that may vary with composition of the materials. I do know that we will not be the ones to explore that market niche. We hit the decision point Greg talked about within the first 3 years of starting up and we decided not to lower the standard on quality. Thus, our wait time and the lack of time or need for us to experiment with other materials.

I agree Johanna. On the other hand, its kind of fun to do! This is a picture where we did the same thing. This is the front end of the half ton sitting on one of our trees. The quality of materials and construction techniques used do make a difference in strength. Note: The “quality control department” had cut the lace and peeled back the rawhide when it was not yet dry to check that section of bar. It didn’t pass muster, which is why we got to drive over it! And even with that spot open, it didn't break the bar. SITTINGUPHIGH1 – where did you get these pictures? I keep trying to figure out them out. There are at least 3 different rawhide trees in these pictures since the hardware on the first, second and fourth are all different. I can’t tell on the one squashed by the tire. And why are there bolts extending through both sides of the front of the “bar” in the first picture? I am not all that versed in English saddles, but I have seen an English tree that was a black plastic of some sort with a built in seat (broken) so some are made with the seats built in as these ones are. On the other hand, these have “bars” that extend out beyond the cantle. Are they a cross bred Aussie tree? Either way, built in ground seats aren’t “traditional” for them either. I don’t know of anyone who makes a built in rawhide seat – just fiberglass or other synthetics – so that is at least part of the covering on these trees. We are not the ones who will run with carbon fiber technology, but I am curious about it. Is it something you have to pour into a mold? Or can it be shaped or carved on its own? Can it be used to overlay something? It is mega-strong, but how flexible is it? Too much flex is not a good thing (despite the number of flex trees out there). Anyone know anything about this stuff? rbd?

Our stand has always been that with good wood (type and construction) you will never need more than one layer of decent thickness rawhide for a normal working tree. And this tree falls under "normal working use" in our terminology. I am attaching a picture of dried rawhide. The measured one is a normal full thickness bull hide, where the term bull hide applies to the full thickness skin off a mature (age makes a difference), male bovine as opposed to a specific thickness of split rawhide. (You cannot buy rawhide that has not been split, and the thinnest piece in our picture is as thick or thicker than any production rawhide we have seen.) The next thickness would be what we would use on an order like this, knowing how hard he would use the saddle. The extra thick one IS overkill. And double rawhiding is overkill IF you use quality rawhide. I remember one phone call. It started with "I have an equipment tester for you." This maker had replaced three trees in guy's saddle in the last few years. So we used a really heavy hide on the tree. It wasn't as pretty as some - extra hide thickness rounds the bar edges more, etc – but it was stout. We've heard a couple good wreck stories since about that saddle, including a big horse flipping over backwards on a concrete pad, but the tree is intact. That was over 10 years ago. And Keith is right. The tree maker should compensate in the wood for the thickness of covering he is expecting to use so the seat length comes out right. But, if you are looking at the rawhide simply as a reinforcement to the fiberglass, that is another ballpark and we aren't players in that game.

Gas is $1.06 a litre (about 4 litres to the gallon) here, and they are pulling it out from the ground underneath us! When we went down to Australia, we discovered that your P/G switches were backwards to ours. Yours were Petrol for what we call Gas, and Gas (LPG) for what we call Propane. We had a truck running on that in the early 90's, but it didn't get the same milage it did with gas. Don't know what the price is like now.

I agree with the others and check other areas. I would doubt riding crooked would warp a tree, though a warped tree could cause the rider to be uneven. Both the person and the horse are moving when riding, so even if they tend to ride unevenly, it won't be a constant pressure. It will sure sore the horse before it damages the tree.

Hi Tim. Roughing up the finish depends on the finish. Gloss finishes often need it because the glue will not stick well. Trees with a matte finish (like we use) generally don't need to be roughed up for the glue to stick. Some of my customers still scuff it up. Others don't and report that the glue sticks just fine. The finish is what protects the rawhide from moisture, so scuffing it removes some of that protection. If you don't have to scuff it up, please don't.

David, We have seen the video, and we talked with a guy at Sheridan who has a new production tree company called Precision trees who tested his trees (with the built in seat) in the same way who said they also broke at the same spot. I would be curious, however, to hear from the saddle makers here who do a lot of repair to see how many trees they have had come in with broken forks. We do a little duplicate work - build new trees for old leather - and of the ones we have done we have only ever had one come in with a broken fork and it had a 2" knot in the single layer fork right where it broke, plus other damage to the tree. The fork is the thickest part of the tree, so in a real life situation, it seems to me it would be the least likely to break. Bars, cantles, horns pulling out, rigging screws giving way - all these things are much more common that forks breaking. I am not sure why in that test they tend to break there (the way its strapped down?, where the pull is placed?), but I would think that long before the pressure got high enough to break the fork, something else on the saddle would have given. The horse sure wouldn't stand there anyway! We haven't yet seen a lab test that matches what happens in real riding, so I am curious as to what others have seen with broken trees. What is the most common place to break a tree and why?

Just an additional note. On our trees, if we change nothing else, the difference from 90 to 93 degrees is only 1/8" across the bottom of the bars. So to change between narrow withers and mutton withers you need to do more than just change that angle, although that is part of the equation. Not much, really. We, and most hand makers, don't have a lot of "bar types" to choose from. I can't really speak for the production trees, but my understanding (correct me if I am wrong, anyone) is that they have certain bar patterns that they use as their template and use duplicating machines of differing types to make the bars based on those templates. For us, every set of bars are individually hand carved. We use measurements to set the hand hole width, the bar angles, the rock, the twist, the amount of crown, length, etc. So we do the same thing for every order - find out the body type the tree will most likely be used on and set the measurements accordingly. Our Wade bars had 1/2" extra front bar tip to accommodate the extra stock thickness of a Wade fork, and are 1/4" deeper (wider) than our "regular" bar. That's the only difference. The fit of the two is determined as above. Surface area is a major component of fit, since you are trying to decrease the PSI in all areas. Even with a really good match in shape, a tree with small, narrow bars can still have too much pressure under it, especially with a heavy rider. That extra surface area can buy you a lot, so long as it doesn't dig in anywhere. I don't think there is a numerical answer to that. It really depends on the quality of materials. I am confident in thinning our laminated hardwood down, knowing that it will also have thicker rawhide protecting it. Knotty pine covered in "chicken skin" will need to be much thicker to have anywhere near the same strength. On the other hand, there are many more places on a saddle and tree that should give long before a fork unless there is a defect in it (ie. a large knot in the middle of it). The leather covering a tree does a lot to help keep it together too. So even if a really thin slick fork breaks, I'd say to check out the rest of the saddle really well for other damage – and tell us the story. It should be interesting.

David, Good questions for someone trying to figure out trees to ask. No easy answers. If you go to the Saddle Supplies, Tools and Trees section there is a bunch of information on fit in a number of threads. You have the basics right in that 93 degrees is a wider angle than 90 degrees and so will fit wider horses better. It is important to note that some makers change other things than just the bar angle when they call their trees 90 or 93 degrees, which they may or may not tell you about, ie. widening the spread between the bars. Here is a link to an article I recently put up on our website that tries to explain why the numbers don’t mean anything between makers anyway. http://www3.telus.net/public/rdnikkel/BarA...sAugust2008.pdf Again, the names of the bar types are meaningless between makers and also in fitting the different breeds because there is more variable within a breed than between breeds. In general, Arab bars will be shorter and set on at a flatter angle. Wade bars will tend to have more surface area to them. The gaited horse community is concerned about allowing free shoulder movement so that is the focus of that bar design. Arizona bars do not have a back stirrup groove, originally intended to cut down on breakage at that spot, which will have negative effects on the fit for the horse. And there are many other names for bars but there is a lot more than the bar shape that goes into getting a good fit for the horse. The bottom line is a that a good bar pattern that has lots of surface area and fits the shape of the horse’s back will not dig in anywhere, will distribute the rider's weight well, and will not interfere with the shoulder regardless of the breed or use of the horse. How narrow can a slick fork be? First, there is no place to measure a slick fork so again, the numbers are meaningless between makers. Everyone calls “this shape” what they want. The strength depends more on the construction used to build the tree than the width of the fork. Straight pine and thin rawhide will not be as strong as having some laminated hard wood and thicker hide. How much surface area is on the bottom of the fork to attach to the bars? While this may be affected by how slick the fork is, there are other factors involved too. And is it stapled together or glued and screwed? So no definitive answer to this one either. We too have questions about trees we want explained…

Interesting what you all are saying about the best time to flesh them. Due to the timing and distance we have to go to get the hides, it is generally 24 hours before Rod can get to fleshing them. He has found it is easier to flesh after a couple of days soaking in water than then. If he ever gets the chance to do one really fresh he may try that out. We also get an occasional hide from local people butchering their own. Rod always tells them to leave as much flesh and fat on the hide as possible. Yes, he has to do the work to take it off, but it sure beats having a hide that is all nicked and cut and has holes all through it because someone was trying to be helpful and get everything off but was not careful enough with their knife. Even at the slaughter house where we get our hides you can see the difference in sides at times. The guy on one side is more careful not to cut the hide than the guy on the other side. In going through the article here http://www.unido.org/fileadmin/import/user...e_unhairing.pdf I have picked out a few interesting facts: 1.) Keratin (the structure hair and the top of the skin is made from) is really resistant to break down physically or chemically, except from sulfide which breaks down the disulphide bonds that hold it together. The more mature the keratin is – the upper layer of skin cells and the hair that is out of the skin – the more resistant it is. Immature keratin is found in newer skin cells, those closer to the basement membrane that holds the epidermis to the dermis (which is the leather and rawhide we keep) and the hair still in the root, and it is a lot more sensitive to breakdown. 2.) When you add alkali – eg. lime – it strengthens those bonds even more so the epidermis and the hair won’t break down as quickly. This process is called immunisation and the factories do this when they want to take the hair off intact and not turn it into sludge like the higher concentration sodium sulfide treatment does. But immunisation doesn’t work as well on the immature keratin, so the weakest point becomes the junction of the epidermis and the dermis. This is why when you take the hair off limed hides that top layer of epidermis comes off as well, leaving the clean rawhide behind. It seems the factories use a little bit of sulfide as well in their later steps to get the hair roots out even if they are trying to save the hair as opposed to destroying it. Using the lime first helps keep the hair intact with this little bit of sulfide. 3.) In regards to straight lime, they say that “Slow alkaline hydrolysis of the corium (dermis) – epidermis boundary layer leads to a loosening of the hair after 3-5 days. In addition, slow degradation of the hide substance occurs, attaining significant level after approximately 8 days. The optimum unhairing time is thus 4 – 6 days.” They don’t talk about temperature in this section and I expect that would have an effect on the length of time. 4.) Another paragraph says “Re-use of old lime liquors after strengthening, as often practiced, renders unhairing more effective because of the unhairing effect of the amines yielded by protein hydrolysis.” So, if you are another hide soon, keep the liquid (if you can stand the smell), add more lime and re-use it. It will work better the second time round. This probably explains why changing the water is not recommended. It works better the older it gets. 5.) They do also say “An increase in temperature accelerates the unhairing process… Temperatures up to 30 degrees C (86 F) are considered safe, whereas at 35 degrees C (95 F) the hide substance is drastically damaged, especially in the grain layer.”

Rod gets the wonderful job of making rawhide. He does mature bulls and occasionally cows, with the hides split down the backbone. The process - leave them in water in a barrel and change the water twice a day for 2-3 days. (Note - we don't have really high temperatures to deal with up here.) This lets them get maximally soaked and makes them easier to flesh. Doesn't seem to affect the dehairing. Then 1/2 a hide goes in the cement mixer with 10 gallons of hot water and about 3/4 a coffee can (exact science, eh?) or about 2-3 cups sodium sulfide and the same amount of lime. Note - wear a mask when putting this stuff in water. It is not nice and can damage lungs I would suspect. If Rod is doing this indoors in the winter, the mask is worn the whole time. It gets tumbled for one hour minimum (and that is usually all it takes unless they have a full winter hair coat on them or are deer - they take longer) to 1 1/2 hours. It needs to be agitated somehow or it all goes to the bottom. The guy Rod learned from made up a drum on wheels with a motor to turn it but second hand cement mixers work great. The hair forms this gross sludge that is easily sprayed away. Then they are fleshed and Warren Wright in New Zealand told us about "scudding", which was new to us. Basically using what is like the back of a knife to scrape the top and squeeze out more goo and extra hair follicles etc. that didn't come out in the bath. It would be good to learn more about this. I wonder if there is a difference in the effect of it if you just use lime (like Warren does) or the sodium sulfide process. Next they go back in the mixer for an hour with water running over them the whole time to rinse them. They get put in a barrel with water and a bit of dish soap (supposed to neutralize things a bit?) the first time, then the water is changed twice a day for another 2-3 days to get them really well rinsed before they are ready for use. This is just what Rod does because that is what he was taught and it has worked OK so far. Here is a link to another paper we were referred to. I am just starting to chew through it and have more questions than answers so far. Maybe someone with more chemistry than I remember can read it and explain it to me. http://www.unido.org/fileadmin/import/user...e_unhairing.pdf

If you could get it consistent it might be worth a try. The problem with the stretchiness is inconsistency. I imagine it would have a nice feel to it, but I have never done it. Rod