I have always ridden horses. I started out riding with my Grandfather on his ranch in southern Arizona at a very young age learning ranch work and roping. Rode a lot of horses and a lot of saddles. Mostly not so great saddles. Bought my first saddle in high school while I was doing a lot of roping. Didn't get my first custom saddle until I was in my 40's. It was made by a guy that is now a very good friend that I have done a lot of guiding and hunting with and he is now a ranch manager south of here. He was previously on a ranch north of here for many years. He has offered for years to let me build a saddle right along side of him. He has 30 plus years saddle building experience. Real nice ones. He still has the first one he did and for a first I think it is perfect. The tooling, stitching, everything about it looks perfect to me. Of course he had a teacher and he says he has learned since then and now I have bit the bullet. The wife and I are both going to build our first saddles along side of our friend. The trees and the leather are on order and should be here in the not to distant future. We are excited and nervous. We each put down money for the highest of quality materials and our friend is guaranteeing that he will not let us put out a bad saddle. If we do our own tooling though he can not guarantee it will be beautiful. But I am OK with that. I am not doing this to sell it. It is for me and Norman and Penny. We took the animals for a trailer ride down there to the ranch to try on trees and it turns out Penny and Norman can wear the same tree. That was a nice plus. My wife Ollie does have some tooling experience and she is not as nervous as I am in this area and if it comes down to it I can leave it plain. Maybe just a simple barbwire border. Can I screw that up? Probably.
To prepare for this endeavor we have taken an old saddle apart that needed a new fleece. Took it apart as much as possible. We cleaned it and oiled it as best we could, wondering the whole time if it was worth the $100 piece of real fleece we bought for it. Still wondering. The leather was pretty dry and dirty. My wife did most of this part and she asked me how often I had cleaned this saddle. I said maybe once. Then offered up that I had not ridden in it for a very long time, like that made it OK. Knowing completely well that it really wasn't OK. I really do take much better care of my newer saddles. This is actually the one I bought in high school all those years ago. A not so great Simco and it was used when I bought it. When we took it apart we actually found a rather long tip of a nail poking through the tree. The only thing on the other side of the tree was a layer of leather and the the fake fleece. Ouch. You all please feel around the inside of your saddles good. Crazy to think about the pain that might have caused. Such terrible craftsmanship too. That nail would have been visible to whomever was putting it together. Another thing we discovered is the plug, (a layer of leather in the skirt to help accommodate for the thickness of the bars, it is cut out around the bars,) that was made of a real dense cardboard instead of leather. Shoddy work and lousy materials and you know what we all pay for these saddles even a good used one is an investment and a bad factory punched out one new is still a lot of money for what you are getting in regards to lack of quality. I never did get bucked off though my pad must have taken care of it.
My next post will be about putting the old Simco back together minus the nail. Old cracked leather and all. My wife did get it pretty soft though, after a thorough washing we used warm not hot olive oil. Just checking it out as a conditioner seeings it is kind of our experiment saddle. I have used it on my other custom saddle since I got it every time I wash it. That is how it was oiled when my friend built it and all of his previous saddles too without ever a problem. Never a rancid saddle anywhere. Once it sinks in I don't think it is olive oil anymore. Plus, these hides are vegetable tanned so they go together great in my opinion. On this rebuild we will be mainly practicing our sewing machine stitching. We don't want ugly stitching on our new saddles.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope you will stop by my next posts as I put the Simco back together and then further on into the whole new saddle process. Its going to be fun!
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