Saddle Trees Part 1

This is one aspect of tack making that is so hard to get right. When I first started making tack, ooh, 10 years ago at least, I used plastic coated garden wire and sellotape to make trees. They didn't have stirrup bars and were a bit flimsy. However they always had a pretty good shape and were flexible so you could bend the resultant saddle to fit lots of different models. Flexibility is something I've always tried to achieve.

Next came the sheet tin trees. I have used these for the majority of the saddles I've made. An example can be seen below on the left, which is a saddleseat tree (note the very cut back head, or fork, at the front). I would use strong tape to attach a wire under the pommel which would then form the stirrup bars. Note in the picture below the stirrup bars have not been bent into shape yet.

In early 2009 I was unemployed for a couple of months and so tried to sell some tack to pay for essentials. In doing so I wanted to improve my techniques. I was never very happy with the sheet tin trees, as they lacked any decent shape in the pommel and cantle areas. An obvious solution for me at the time was to sculpt a bit of form in these areas. The tree on the right in the above picture shows one of these. This one has had a seat fitted but I ripped it off as I wasn't happy with it. You can sort of see how I've built up a pommel at the front and lifted the cantle. This technique has served me well for a few years but it has some major drawbacks. Firstly it takes time to sculpt and wait for the putty to harden. It was always hard work getting a true symmetrical shape, and since the girth billets were attached before the sculpting, it was hard to keep them clean, requiring extra work and fiddling about. So last week I decided to go back to basics. I got out my 'To Handmake a Saddle' book by J. H. L. Shields. I looked at loads of pictures and videos of saddle trees, and decided to try and make a tree from scratch that looks more like the real thing.

Et Voila!

This is still a prototype, as I've already found that the bars are too low at the pommel end, and will cause me to have to make my skirts quite long. However it's a good start and I'm feeling confident that it will give me a really nicely shaped seat, that won't be flat and will have the correct concavity/convexity in all the right places. The tree has been made from brass which I had to use tin snips to cut, and a jewellers hammer and my mini anvil to get the the correct shape.

The stirrup bar shown is after several unsuccessful attempts. Firstly I tried soldering on some thin brass rod. But I suck at soldering and it just wasn't happening. This was not going along with my time saving plan! Next I tried the glue gun, but it didn't hold very well and the bars were standing proud of the surface too much and would have resulted in an ugly bump. Solution three, also the quickest, saw me punch holes into the tree, thread some 1mm silver coated wire through and hammer it closed. They are solid, and nearly flush with the tree on both sides as the silver wire is much softer.

You may want to ask why so much effort when you can buy ready-made cast english trees? Well, I've never used a cast tree, even though I have one in my stash, and although they can be modified to a certain extent, they will never be as versatile as one made from scratch. I will be developing a wide range of tree patterns in three traditional sizes and probably 4 or 5 different styles, ranging from saddleseat (see next post) to deep seated dressage trees to flat, square-cantled jumping trees.

I don't think my new brass trees will be used for all scales, probably just traditional and classic scales. The tin sheet tree will do for smaller scales just fine.

The next post will cover the development of my new saddleseat tree including making the seat.