First Saddle Build

[rktaylor]

Looks like you have made some progress. At this stage, I suggest you think about rigging placement. Unless it is used exclusively on a pony, standard rigging placement is tough to make work. 

Randy

[mbnaegle]

On 1/3/2026 at 6:13 PM, rktaylor said:

Looks like you have made some progress. At this stage, I suggest you think about rigging placement. Unless it is used exclusively on a pony, standard rigging placement is tough to make work. 

Randy

Yes. I think this saddle is best served as a pleasure saddle and not built for any specific tasks like roping, racing, etc. That said I think the typical double ring rigging would be fine, but that placement of the rings I'm still deciding on. The first photo's of how the saddle started, the rings appear much lower than they should be, but the way they had made the skirts (not sure what style you would call it as they just covered the sides and sewed fleece to the bottom with no real "skirt"?) kind of makes them look lower compared to a traditional saddle. Most of the traditional double ring saddles I'm looking at for inspiration show both rings at the same level, though Al Stoleman's book gives some good points to setting the front rings lower than the back so they don't interfere with the stirps. He also brings up the merits of mounting the back rings to a wider area, having the leather come up each side and lace together behind the seat, provided it doesn't make any raised lumps under the skirts and seat. Coming up with the rigging design for sure needs to be settled before laying in and carving down the floor leather, but I plan to get both started next.

I'm also considering attaching the front rings to the tree in the typical way and building the back rings into the skirts as a way to get around having the rear ring  mount and the floor leather get in each others way. My only reservation with doing something like this is that it would be a newer design than the traditional saddles I'm trying to emulate.

Al Stoleman's book does give some good guidance on how the front rigging placement can interfere with the stirrups and the horses shoulders. With my lack of experience though, I'm wondering if it would be best to keep it simple with the rings at a full or 3/4 position? Mounting the front rings lower also seems to lead to the skirts being elongated in the front to support them. I'd like the skirts to be the more traditional long and squared off design, but that could work to my advantage being able to mask the hight difference between the rings without changing the skirt design.

One other thing I might do is replace the front rings with something a little bigger. Reason being is to make it easier to adapt the saddle to a bigger horse. Part of this build is I do want to put together a cinch and ladigo's so it's all ready to go, but I haven't delved too far into that topic yet and not sure if I can make a 'one-size-fits-all' rig for a saddle this small, or if it's better to have a smaller rig for smaller horses and a larger rig for larger horses, and just tackle that aspect once I know what animal it's going to go on, and just stop at the rings for now.

Edited Monday at 08:13 PM by mbnaegle

[mbnaegle]

Just to give some perspective, these are some of the family saddles I'm taking inspiration from, and eventually want to repair, restore, or preserve.

This saddle my grandfather had made in the 60's and was one of his general use working saddles. It's one that's still usable.

This one was a general use saddle on grandpas ranch, though it was mainly used by my Dad in high school. He had a drop calf he raised on a bottle and eventually trained it to ride and do circus style tricks as a rodeo act, and from the pictures I'm 90% sure this was the saddle he used.

This saddle was my great grandfathers and goes back to the 1880's. It's one we've decided to preserve and not restore, as every piece would need to be replaced, and the tree's shape wouldn't fit modern horses anyway. The wear and tear on it to me speak volumes of hard life in the west and give me gratitude for what I have, so I wouldn't want to lose that restoring it.

As you can see, these are all standard double ring rigging, and I'm thinking I'll use their ring placement and proportions on the youth saddle in this thread.

I also started a thread for a saddle my Dad started before he passed, and I hope to complete.

Restoring a Porter Saddle

I'll also start threads for each of these and some other saddles eventually.

Edited Tuesday at 02:23 AM by mbnaegle

[mbnaegle]

Here's another Pic showing the rigging from the Porter saddle thread. This is interesting as it's similar to Al Stolemans style of double rigging, but also has an additional reinforcement of having the leather for the front rings wrap clear over the swells. This kind of makes sense as the front rings have so much more holding responsibility than the rear, which seem to mainly stabilize the saddle.

I don't want to detor too much from the standard saddle design for this build, but I'm wondering if the very basic leather tabs that held the rings previously contributed to the bottom ears of the tree breaking off? If so, it would be good to go a step further in how the rigging is mounted to the saddle. I did some sketching tonight and am thinking about doing a simple hybrid of the Stoleman double ring design, and the Porter design. The Leather would need to have the edges tapered and skived so it dosn't mess with how the seat, jockeys, and swell cover mounts, but it could help the geometry of the tree.

I'm going to stick with the welded rigging rings, but carry the leather for the front rings over the swells, and the leather for the back rings around the back of the seat with the same strap continuing forward in front of the rear rings to make the connecting strap. It shouldn't radically alter the appearance and outer design of the saddle, but improve how their holding is distributed across the tree. I'll make a card-stock paper pattern first, and will make patterns for all the other pieces as well which might help one day to eventually build out the unused saddle tree and rebuild the junk store saddle pictured previously.

This saddle didn't have a metal floor panel, and there was no hand hole under the swells, but both I plan to add when I do the ground floor leather.