JRedding

Skip, not every customer is a good customer, she sounds pretty toxic to me, folks like that usually end up costing you so much in time you end up not making anything in the end and you've put up with the headache for nothing. Usually a saddlemaker has two choices with a situation like this either pass on the job alltogether, or plan on it being a pain in the a#$ and price it accordingly for the extra time and misery you'll likely endure.

Pete, I use a spray bottle instead of the sponge and I wet the whole piece pretty well I like to carve wetter than I tool just because it's easier, by the time you've finished carving it's dried enough to tool , that kind of depends on the size of the project but that's the basic idea. then you can just spray it a little bit to keep the moisture consistant. It's just a practice deal learning to read the leather, some leather seems to return faster than others and here it varies from summer to winter, you have to feed it a little different in August than you do in January but once you've learned the look and feel of what you want it's not so hard. I just don't beleive there's a formula that's correct and always works well, like you can take any brand of leather of any weight , and at any climate and case it for a set amount of time and it's going to hand you back the best results possible to be tooled. Learning to read the leather and make adjustments for what you've got at hand will make a lot of leather give you good results as opposed to just treating it all the same, and wondering why one piece is so agreeable and the next isn't. Casing is pretty much a set formula, you're going to case it long enough it balances the moisture throughout it's layers, I just think it may have worked better when all the leather was tanned with basically the same process in every tannery and it was a lot harder leather than we see today.

I guess I'm the odd man out here I don't case leather to tool it, I've tried it but just never loved the results. I've experimented a lot and came up with different conclusions that work for me. The leather we get today is not the same as it was back in the fifties , sixties , or probably the seventys, I hung out in the old Newton Bros. shop here as I'm sure many of you have the old local saddleshop, the leather they dealt with back then was harder than a jailhouse door, it wouldn't mold to shape without hot water, and it wouldn't tool without casing, thirty or forty years later the EPA has forced the tannerys to re-invent the process several times since most of the literature people are referring to was written. It's kind of a case of nothing stays the same and the changes in the tanning process have definately changed the behavior of leather. I don't case to tool because I don't feel todays leather is so hard I need to for it to accept it. As everybody knows casing allows the moisture time to penetrate and even out throughout the thickness of the leather, thus the back becomes as formable as the front making it easier for the leather to stretch. By leaving the back as dry and hard as I can it retains some of it's own rigidity helping it hold it's shape. Something like moistening it and then taping it to try and control it except without all the extra steps. I tape small projects made out of lighter weight leathers and then moisten from the top down and have little to no stretch, but leather in projects like that have almost always been leveled on the back that's a different thing. Leather being a product of nature has a knit all it's own that holds it together, once it's been leveled the knit of the fibers has somewhat been destroyed it no longer has a top and a bottom it only has a top and a middle once it's been leveled, and it no longer has near the ability to hold itself together that it once had. Taping and scrimping on the moisture as much as possible really helps me control the stretch on leveled leather. In a nutshell you're not tooling deep enough you're into the bottom layers of a piece of leather if the surface you're working with isn't so hard you have to case it to be able to tool it why do it ? I've just had my best results by trying to get the moisture in the portion I'm working with and leaving the portion I'm not alone as much as possible. I'm sure others have drawn different conclusions and as long as it works then it's a good conclusion this is just my approach.

Bob, you think that's funny the rest of that story is my sister - in- law was in the shop at the time, I didn't yell or anything I've been cut and smashed so many times I don't really feel it like normal people, anyway I just ask her to come over and help me trying not to alarm her, because this gal pushes the panic button like she's playin' Jeopardy over everything, when she saw that needle resting right in the middle of my finger she quit the building like someone yelled fire, by the way she left the place I didn't think she'd be coming back anytime soon so that's when I started playing my little game of twister.

Since everybody's confessing their dumb mishaps here's mine. After running a stitching machine nearly everyday for eighteen years I finally got bit, I lifted the foot, made a sweep under the lifted foot with the needle resting at the top of the stroke with my right hand to pick up the threads and brush the tails to one side so I didn't gather one up and suck it in the bobbin and at just the right time I bumped the throttle and drove a 180 needle in an Adler 205 machine right through the fingernail of my index finger on my right hand, dead center at the cuticle. I flinched , jumped off the throttle and it stopped at the bottom of the stroke with half a stitch tied through my finger, it's hard to reach over with your left hand and roll the flywheel to bring the needle back up while holding enough foot pressure on the tredle to release the coast brake without gasing it and sewing up to your third knuckle, (these old Adlers will sew a few stitches even after they're turned off unless you wait ) , it's a real game of Adler twister. I got it raised, cut myself out of it,and pulled the thread out of my finger,The strange part about this was it never bled, and it wasn't as sore as hitting one with a hammer.

I thought this one looked fun, I tried to keep all the basic elements in place and just come up with a little different version.

Some days you just gotta' go fishin'

Jon, what a beatiful saddle, your usual nice job. . I'm not familiar with building an in-skirt with a rear D like that you wouldn't have some under construction pictures of one somewhere would you ?

I don't have them, wish I did. The last I knew they were still in Bountiful, his wife still lives there and was still running their repair shop the last I knew. I'd just like to find out any history I could about them.

Just for the sake of conversation, I had an old friend in Bountiful, Utah who has since passed away who had a collection of tooling tools that were very old, every tool was black, it looked like gun bluing with a lot of wear, and they were stamped U.S. Govt. He told me the government had them made after WWII and they were dispersed and used in veterans hospitals around the country. He aquired his collection of about forty to fifty pieces in pawn shops and a few at yard sales. I've mentioned the government tools I'd seen to a few other carvers over the years but no one I've talked to has ever seen them. With all the people here I thought someone else may have some information or possibly have in their collection some of these government tools.

Hilly, Don't know if it helps and it sounds like what I do is highly irregular, I avoid having difficulty hand sewing by matching my needle size to the thread I'm using, and my awl size to the needle I'm using. Think of setting up to hand sew similiar to setting up a sewing machine, with matching components, the thread has to fit the project it's intended for and the needle and awl have to be an appropriate size so the thread passes through with no more difficulty than a machine would contend with. Occasionaly a needle hangs up and pliers are needed but if every stitch requires them something is making it hard on you. I think what I do that's irregular is I don't hand sew with heavy waxed thread if it's going to be seen, I sew with the same thread I use in my sewing machine, the reason, I use it is I handsew horns and cantles on my saddles and I don't like it if you can tell the difference between the machine stitch and the handsewn, that's what I strive for anyway. Sewing machines don't use waxed thread, and no one questions the durability or quality of a good machine stitch so why use it to handsew, a two needle handsewn stitch is probably a stronger stitch than a loop type stitch a machine uses so why not use the same thread as you'd feed a machine. I'll probably catch some flack about this but I just looked at it one day and thought "you'll never make it look as good as a machine can do if you keep using that big ugly thread" so I quit, that was many years and several hundred saddles a go and it's stood the test of time. Just how I do it, maybe it'll help somehow

count me in I'd like to see archery gear, and learn something new.

I really like your work, do you sell any of your work or take custom orders, I'd sure like to add a piece to what I've got ?

Hide, there is a pair on a saddle picture I posted here in the member gallery in December , it's an overhead veiw. I've got some more pics somewhere, you can do them seamless out of veg tan and chap leathers like usual. It's the same way a bootmaker lasts a boot, that's where I figured it out. Almost anything they can last into a boot you can do into a buckin' roll. One good thing about it is there is no welts to get busted open. And you can make a last any size or shape you like, I have a couple different sizes.

I hated to sew buckin' rolls so I learned to build mine over a last I guess that's how it's spelled, they're one piece, no welts.

Don, It looks great, especially for a first, you did say that's your first didn't you? It's a lot better job than I did on the first one that's for sure. I really don't know what to say , you picked a difficult saddle to build and you nailed it, the difficulty level on that for a first saddle was high and it looks great,fit and finish are nice. Congragulations, are you ready to do it again ?

I'm not a treemaker but I'm trying to get something out of this anyway. There's talk about a baseline standard, but how could that ever really be established more accurately than it is ? Like I said I'm not a treemaker but I've sure bought a lot of them and sold them all over the U.S. and a few abroad. I've learned the baseline standard in Texas is vastly different from that in Idaho, and everyones riding the same breed basically, I don't do anything for rare breeds.Horse conformation varies widely by region. If you never sold a saddle outside your immediate area it would be one thing but taking calls from every state it's another. And some of this has to depend on what you're using it for, what seems to be improved engineering for some lady rider in a round pen back east may be the worst idea ever for some cowpuncher in Farson Wyoming, and that cowpunchers rig likely wouldn't serve too well at a California cutting.They're all different horses, with different riders, in diifferent types of country being used for different jobs. How do you baseline standard that ? So I guess my question is how much better can it be done ?Or is this just a circular conversation that's going nowhere?

I doubt very many people could put up with all the nitpicken' saddlemakers for any length of time. You have the patience of Jobe.

The easiest way I've found to twist fringe is to use Shoe Stretch instead of water, it's really a diluted mixture of rubbing alcohol except Shoe Stretch costs about fifteen dollars a gallon and rubbing alcohol is dirt cheap in the grocery store. soak your fringe in that instead of water, twist each fringe tight, put your finger on the base of the fringe holding it tight against the bench so you don't pull a weak one off and pull the fringe tight, hold each one for a few seconds and release it, it will relax some but by overtwisting it to begin with once it relaxes a little you'll have about what you expect. Just let it dry and it will stay twisted. It's pretty fast this way if your hands don't cramp up you can do a pair of chinks in a little over an hour if you don't weaken.

I've watched this post a long time to see where it ended up and it's definately been interesting, the pros and cons of each are many. I'm a rawhide fan, I've always used rawhide covered trees and always will. I just can't see where line-x or any similiar material would add strength to a tree but maybe it does , leaving the science of chemical property out of it my thought is if you took a twelve by twelve sample of each , found the most destructive person you know and said tear it up by any means possible, go in the tool shed use what you can find, use fire if you want to, it will be a job to make that rawhide dissapear, it's just tough, the line-x could probably be made dissapear with a pair of toenail clippers, or a cigarette lighter. On the other side, what about all those really old trees you occasionaly see that were covered in rawhide but it was goat or something, that stuff was thin as paper, and couldn't have done much for the strength of a tree, some of the trees I've seen with that had to be a hundred years old, so maybe for some applications, depending on how it's being used line-x could be a good alternative. The one point I've watched for but it hasn't appeared yet is what about the saddlemaker selling the idea to his customers? rawhide covered trees are the standard , everyone knows how well it works no questions asked, when you're selling saddles anywhere above the mid-price range a quallity rawhide covered tree is expected, it wouldn't matter if line-x was ten times better some customers are not going to accept it, for me the only reason my customers would accept it is if I talked them into it , and gaurenteed it myself, and no one is clear if it's even equal let alone better, so my point is why would a sadddlemaker who normally uses rawhide trees , break tradition, make his customers raise their eyebrows, enroll himself to be a salesman for a product that is never going to send him a royalty check, lay his reputation on the line and hoping they all don't start showing back up on your doorstep in the next few years. Whether it's better or not there is some problems convincing saddle buying customers that it's an improvement, my question is as a saddlemaker making a living, not including the hobbyist saddlemaker who doesn't rely on saddle sales to live, do you have the spare time to stop and sale the idea? and could you afford to lose any sales because some customers just don't buy it? Is the idea, or the improvement if it even is one worth what it's going to cost a saddle shop in time and money to use it?

you'll never regret learning to handstitch and do it well, you might also consider some more decorative means of putting holsters together like a nice buckstitch job or edge lace with kangaroo lace and a nice triple stitch. It's just a couple ideas

Rod, I've never spent time thinking how to deliberately break a tree just to see how strong it was so I guess I can't help you there, I don't beleive I've ever had a good quality tree just break under normal conditions, I don't build steer trippin' saddles and I've heard from some of the Texas makers I know say it will happen there. I've been told several times a tree just broke, It's kind of funny the few broken trees I've had usually come in with the same story attached, " I just roped this old cow and heard it snap, so I brought it in" the funny part about hearing this same story is one guy I know well enough to know he couldn't rope a cow unless he ran her out of air and she laid down, but that's the story he brought in. I had one guy that was breaking them intentionally about once a year I think so he could trade it in broke and order a new saddle, the broken tree was to justify the trade to his wife I beleive, I had this happen four years in a row with this guy, one of them came back with tire tracks on it. The only guy I'm sure told me the entire story lost a horse over a ledge while leading him up a steep slope in the wilderness unit of the Book Cliffs near here, about eighty feet they said, and nothing faired very well, lost a horse, saddle, and a new Weatherby rifle, they hauled that saddle back up but it was a waste of time, the leathers weren't really worth salvaging and the tree was broke in pieces from about kindling down to matchsticks. Most of the broken trees I've had it was pretty apparant by the fresh damage on the horn and cantle they'd had a horse on his back, and they're usually broke in the bars right under the stirrup leathers. I'd say saddletrees get a good, realistic, test daily to prove themselves under steady proper use, the number of trees you, or any good treemaker has put out there and the number of broken trees that resulted from something other than a wreck, pretty much speaks for itself, and there's nothing a treemaker can do to avoid ever having a broken tree come out of a wreck.

It really doesn't matter if that kit was the worst one ever, I can tell you got your moneys worth from the way you described working with your boy, if a little leatherwork is something you can do with your kids that makes it twice as much fun.

Art, whether you antique it or not is just a personal preference, it will look good either way. You mention following the book, what book are you referencing to?

Art, I can't recomend resolene, we tried it and didn't like the results, we use tan-kote, bag-kote, harness dressing, or neat-lac depending on the finish we're trying to get. the saddle you're working on looks like a good start, you're ground work on the seat looks good. I know there a lot of ways to put one together , and no one really does it the same but I'm curious why the riggings on after the swell cover and bottom skirts? I'm only asking because if that saddle ever went in for repairs like needed a horn cover or relined someone will have to pull the riggings to do it, that's just extra work. Assuming a saddle that style will have strings, are you planning on drilling and stringing it and how with the skirts already on?