1St Saddle

[Newfman]

LOL, well, I'm sure you had a meeting of the minds with that 'somebody', that cut the seat too small the first time. At least you have a very nice piece of scrap. Plenty of things to make from that. Besides, you may be doing a small seat someday.

From another thread, i had been talking about the Dale Harwood videos. I have a list of tools that he used to make the rough-out wade on the DVD. there didn't seem like there were very many, until I looked at the list. Some were certainly to make the job quicker and cleaner, and could have been done with an existing variant. A couple things, different size edgers for example, puts his sense of finish to it. His head knife was a smaller one. That I noticed.

Dale also has a few tools that likely no longer exist, except in some little backwater used tool shack that only the locals know even exist. Hmmmm. Speaking of which. I actually know of one of those about 8 miles from here. He mostly has old blacksmiting tools and carpentry tools, but there are likely to be some useful things there. This could be fun.

What materials did you use to learn to make the patterns? Books? Videos? Deductive reasoning? Guessing?

I still think that is a great first saddle. Truly impressed.

Dennis

[rgerbitz]

To make my patterns I followed along with Jeriamiah Watts videos and used a boat load of by guess and by golly. I learned, a little to slowly, that it is best to make your patterns way to big and trim and shave as needed then to try and cover 2 feet with 1.9 feet of leather.