Mulesaw

Here is the information of the Portugal office from Amann's homepage: If they won't sell it to you directly, they can probably tell you who sells it in Portugal Portugal AMANN Portugal Avenida dos Arcos do Sardão, 391 Zona Industrial 4430-434 Oliveira do Douro Vila Nova de Gaia Portugal Phone: +351 227 877 040 Fax: +351 227 877 049 E-Mail: geral@amann.pt Contact: Mario Silva

I use Amann Serafil for my leather sewing machines. I buy it at laederiet.com , it is a Danish based shop, so inside the EU. They have a great homepage and a super service. They stock Serafil 10, 20, 40 and 180. They can get a size 30 too, but they don't keep that in stock, but they will get it for you if you ask them to. https://lederiet.com/shop/?search=serafil Good luck Brgds Jonas

Laederiet.com or pethardware.com Laederiet is based in Denmark. Pethardware is based in Czeckia. I don't know if their prices are better than what you can find in Canada, but to me they are quite OK. I buy almost all my stuff from laederiet, and they have good products, but price and quality go hand in hand here as well. I have no idea how much it would be in postage though. Brgds Jonas

Baleage is pretty popular for horses where I live, but it is not the same as for the cows. If you make it for cows it can be bales and wrapped more or less immediately after it has been harvested/mowed. If you make it for horses it needs to dry first, kind of like for regular hay except you don't let it dry quite as long. After the drying it is pressed into bales and wrapped. there is a lot of work involved in the process when it is used for horse feed, due to all the regular steps so it isn't cheap, but the horses like it and it is easy to store outside during the rainy autumn and winter. But like you say, you need a sizeable herd to eat it before it turns bad.

Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I don't think it is very fast though, but it might be able to do some stitching near hardware etc. :-)

I found a J&R SD28 on a Danish classified page catering for vintage cars. there's a section for miscellaneous and the machine was suddenly there. The seller wanted 500 Danish kroner for it (72 US$), so I figured that it couldn't hurt to buy it. It was placed quite far from where I live, but I have a friend who happened to be in the neighborhood anyway, so I sent him some money and he paid the seller. Now I just need to get it from my friend at some point. But that's no hurry - well and I also need to try to locate some needles for it. From what I have read they are not readily available anymore, so if any of you happen to have a spare needle that you could spare, I'd definitely be interested. It should be a system called 1551 as far as I have been able to gather. There is one needle on the machine, so I am not completely stuck, but it couldn't hurt to have an extra. It is kind of strange that even as a adult, finding a bargain like that is able to make you happy. But I like that, since I guess it is proof that even though my age is advancing, my heart and mind is still pretty much what it used to be :-) I haven't got any pictures of the machine yet, but when I get my hands on the machine at some point, I'll be sure to post them.

Gee, I wouldn't know how to stay diplomatic in that case.. I am so glad to hear that you are 4 years cancer free in November. That is such good news, and great that your oncologist could see that it was "only scarring", normally I shouldn't say "only" about something like that, but in comparison with cancer, It really is. We had the most fantastic weather in May and June, with July being fairly wet and grey. August was better, but all in all a very good season to receive chemo therapy. Also all our children are almost grown up. the two boys still living at home are 17 and 20, so they don't come home from kindergarten or school every other week with a cold or the flu etc. Brgds Jonas

I heard that for the German Shephard, many dogs have been bred with lower hind legs, because it gives a pleasing exterior look that will win points at a show, but it gives problems with the hips and the dog is then suddenly bred for a show purpose instead of a working purpose. One of my acquaintances said it was a bit of a problem for the police, since they rely on the dog's working capability, so they are much more limited when it comes to breeders that they can choose from. The same with those small snouted dogs that are bred so that they can hardly breathe anymore. Well, back to the horses. Most horses are still bred to be ridden which is good, and since we have grown over the last generations, it makes sense that the riding horses should do the same. Brgds Jonas

@chuck123wapati Thank you, it really helps to know that we are not alone in it. They really have come a long way with the chemo treatment, and we have been very lucky that Mette discovered it when the nodes were still really small. But it still lingers in the back of the head a lot of the time. The first 3 times she had the chemo, I drove her to the hospital, since she got another injection of something that had a red warning triangle on it, so she couldn't drive home, and those waiting rooms.. even if they don't look like a regular hospital waiting room, there is definitely a different mood in there compared to the part of the hospital for giving birth. When I get home from the ship this time, she'll have a surgery, and then I think there is still a couple of months with chemo before the treatment is over. And then there will be check up's every so often for the next couple of years. Thanks, Jonas

Wow, that sounds frightening! I hope that you have recovered completely. It is such a big scary disease, and the psychological impact on the patient and the family is hard to imagine.

Sorry for the late reply, But even if the velcro bubbled a bit or warped a bit, it won't matter. Your outer flap will press on the velcro or the blocks, so it'll be flat anyway. I repaired a saddle a couple of months ago (I think it was a Passier), that one had the same system, with removable blocks. I forgot to take some pictures of how the velcro was attached to the blocks and the saddle. But if you google: "passier velcro blocks" - there are lots of pictures of them. Acetone and contact glue wouldn't hurt and it would definitely keep the velcro in place during stitching. Brgds Jonas

@TomE Thanks a lot for the kind words, I am still struggling to make the edges look as nice as yours does. But I was in a bit of a rush when I made the first two, because there had to be a matching set for an event at Helgstrand Dressage center. So I did the easy thing and used Tokonole :-) I wouldn't mind doing a bit of work for the German market, but I am afraid that a place like the Von Rönne farm has got some pretty good discount deals with some of the big brands in Germany. But I could always do a lot of repairs for them. Wisconsin is quite a bit of a trip from Saint louis, I hope they'll have great weather for driving, but given that it is later summer I bet it'll be a spectacular and beautiful trip with the trees changing colour. Keuring is very close to the Danish word "kåring" which is used in Danish Warmblood and other breeds for the appraisal of foals and youngsters etc. Just by having one homemade bridle will still set you greatly apart from most people at any event. So the I think you are too hard on yourself with the cobbler analogy Coming to think of it, I think that most of the triple sewn halter was done by hand because I started attaching the nose band and then going "round". So I couldn't make it lie flat on the sewing machine. On the two double stitched halters I took the noseband last. That made it a heckuvalot easier and faster. I'll keep my fingers crossed for your foals for the keuring. Brgds Jonas

They were too small. I used the old German book "Sattler, Riemer und Täschnerhandwerk" , and I found that the measurements were on the small side. Horses in general have been bred bigger, and looking at highly bred horses they still tend to be very harmonic looking. Something that is not possible if the head is either too large or too small. Actually the size of the head can completely throw off the harmonic look of a horse. It is interesting, because when you look at the original breeding standards set out for the various breeds, the sizes today often exceeds the original desired size. But I think it is the same as in dog breeding. the bigger the dog is the more impressive it will look in a show ring, and it has to be an incredibly harmonic animal to outweigh the basic human awe of something that is big. And for horses it is probably out of necessity due to the human frame being bigger now than 100 years ago. So if an average sized person wants to ride today they need a horse that would have been considered large just two generations ago. The opposite is probably the case when it comes to work horses. But there aren't that many of those around so I don't know for sure. The black one is very classy :-) Brgds Jonas

@jrdunn Thanks :-) @Gezzer Thanks :-) I have to say that I haven't still quite decided which I like the best, but he is the "customer", so I just made it like he asked for. The good thing is that it is easily recognizable which halter goes to which horse, if you know what to look for.

Thanks, We have tried to look at the positive things like it all happening during the warmer months, so very little risk of catching a cold or a flu which would be bad when the immune system is kind of knocked out by the treatment. Now there's one more chemo treatment to go before surgery, so we are starting to be able to see an end to it. Brgds Jonas

Earlier on I have tried to make halters with measurements from very old books, and the results were a nice looking halter that didn't fit. I guess that the size of warmblood horses have changed over the last 100 years. But using the sizes suggested by @TomE in an earlier post on this forum resulted in some really well fitting halters (link at the bottom). The first one was made as a brown triple sewn halter, but Gustav (our son) asked if I could try to make one also in brown with just a double stitching, since he thought that it would look nice. So I made one for his other horse, and finally I made a slightly smaller black one for his girlfriends horse. For some reason most of the jumping horses use brown tack, and dressage horses almost exclusively uses black tack, so that's why I have used those colours. A couple of months back I bought a pantograph for engraving stuff. And I have engraved some small name plates for the horses, and sewn those onto the halters. Most of the sewing was done on my old Singer class 7, but a few places it was necessary to do the sewing by hand. Since the Singer is an old flatbed, I found out that the easiest way to get the sewing done was to do the noseband last. That way I could still get all the parts to be flat instead and that helped a lot. The edges were sanded and given a bit of Tokonole, and the halters were treated with my homemade leather grease. The first halter, made for Cajou (Holsteiner horse) 2nd halter, for Carlo (Westfaler horse) 3rd halter, for Santos (Danish warmblood) Homemade name tags Cajou grazing between two jumping sessions at a tournament. I followed the excellent instructions provided by @TomE in this post:

@TomE I'll try to see if I can get a post up on the halters, I know they can't in any way compete with yours in the look or finish, but at least it'll show that I once in a while do some actual work Gustav has landed at job at Sören von Rönne in Germany riding young horses, so in a month or so he is off. He is looking very much forward to it. Brgds Jonas

Welcome to the forum :-) Your stuff looks really good. I especially like the camera bag and the red and green bag for your wife and sister. Brgds Jonas

Sorry for being a bit late to the party. Beautiful work as always! I have made 3 halters using your excellent document. Though only one of them was triple stitched (the first one). Gustav wanted me to make one with only a double stitching, and I did that for his new horse and for his girlfriends horse as well. The document is really great, and the sizes are spot on. Something I have experienced problems with when I tried to follow the sizes given in very old books. Brgds Jonas

You are absolutely right. Horses smell the best when they have been grazing. There is a difference in the smell if they have been eating hay in the winter time compared to the smell of them in the summer when they are on grass. Despite being 50 years old, I still deeply inhale that smell whenever we go to fetch the horses and bring them home in the summer. It is a smell that goes all the way down to happy childhood memories. Oh yeah, leather smells nice too, but a horse beats that smell in my world :-)

I have recently rebuilt some driving tack, but I am by no means an expert. I think that your method is the strongest of the two since the buckle is held in place by the folded leather loop. On the lower version it looks like a few of the stitches just on the buckle has disappeared. Perhaps by abrasion? That would in my opinion easier lead to that the buckle could become loose and "slide" further down the strap. Each time a stitch will break on that version, the buckle can move the equivalent length closer to the end of the line. On your version, if 4 stitches break, the buckle will still be in the exact same position. By the way, it is looking great as usual :-)

Thanks for the heads up.

My best suggestion is that there is something stuck in the needle mounting hole (where the shank of the needle sits)- It could be some small debris, it doesn't take much to get the needle out of alignment. My reasoning is that it sewed fine on your first attempt, so I doubt that it is something that has been bent. Try to take out the needle and spray some brake cleaner into the hole, perhaps try to use an interdental toothbrush at the same time. Or if you can take of the needle mounting part (I can do that on my Singer patchers), then you can clean it thoroughly. Good luck :-)

A quick update The chemo therapy has worked a lot better than we had hoped for, Mette has felt OK for most of the time, with the usual side effects like loosing hair and being a bit more tired etc. But all in all a lot better than expected. The last type of medication was of a different type compared to the first rounds, and she felt a bit nausea after getting it, but there are now 2 weeks between the treatments so that is good. The hospital have planned for the surgery in the late September, and they are still intending to do a surgery that will only remove the dead tissue from inside the breast, so that is very positive. Mette has been feeling so well that she has "sent me back to sea", I'll be back in time for her surgery which is good, and it has also been good that I have been able to stay at home with her all this time. Take care y'all

Looks really good!