We finally see our trees and our leather this week. Lovely soft supple Herman Oak leather. A joy to touch and smell. The shop smells wonderful. The trees are all glossy in shellacked rawhide.

Last time I wrote I told you about all the options we were going to have to decide upon in regards to designing and building our saddles. Well, we both went with Arizona bars and Will James front ends, or the forks/swells. We like that the swells are a bit wide at the outside bottom and help to hold you in and give your legs a place to grip if you need to. We both also ordered 8.5 inches tall and 6.5 inches in the width of the gullet. one quarter inch taller that all of our other saddles to allow a bit more room in the wither area. One quarter inch is not much in height but as that measurement pulls up away from the horses withers it creates just enough more room to not interfere with the withers or movement in the shoulders. To also not allow it to droop down in the shoulders we went a quarter inch narrower in the width as compared to our other saddles and Clara's.

Arizona bars, ordered from Timberline, are a favorite of Randy's and he has always had good luck with them. Not too short or long, a good shape at the ends and with the bottom of the bars with just a little bit of convex shape and a half of a stirrup leather guide supposedly for strength during roping. Randy does a lot of roping on the ranch. Clara's saddle has the Arizona bars. Randy has had real good luck having this tree fit mules. That is mostly what he builds for and that also fits Clara our mule really well. It is also nice that it fits a wide range of horses too. I ordered a sixteen and Ollie a 15.5 inch seat size. My horn is a 3 inch rope horn and Ollie went with one a bit more traditional not too long and a bit more slender around with the top 2.5 inches. She can still wrap it if she wants to. I will wrap mine. So there are a lot of decisions already made just right there.

As we pondered our spot in this process and all of the rest of the design decisions we will have to make while Randy started putting Liquid Nail all over his pretty new shining saddle trees, he had ordered three for himself. He used a putty knife, a flexible silicone one and smoothed over all the nail holes dimples in the tree to smooth them out. Inside the swell was a bit dimply so a good coat around in there. Also skimming a layer over the stitches to smooth and float those out a bit. Especially in the swell and back of cantle area as the leather does not go over anything right there. Just leather and glue. Maybe tooled leather and glue. But the raised stitches might be evident if not smothered and floated out. When it dries it is sand able to make real smooth. Liquid nail stays flexible and therefore was a better choice than Bondo as it would be dry and brittle and crack out and crumble if a nail was used in it.

So we took out trees home and slathered them with Liquid Nail. It was kind of easy but messy but we got a coat on where we needed it. Let it all dry twenty four hours and then sanded to see where we needed more and added a second coat. Come to find out we kinda overkilled it. But we want success so we tried hard. Randy only did the one coat and said the leather would smooth out the rest.

While the trees were home we tried them on our animals to see what that looked like. Did not get any pictures of that but we were really pleased with how those Arizona bars sat on our horses and mules backs. They all looked quite comfortable Norman, Penny and Cochise in the bones of their new duds. Thanks again for stopping by.