From: hannah@pomponio.ai.sri.com (Marsha Jo Hannah)
Newsgroups: rec.equestrian
Subject: Re: Saddle question (modeling a horse's back)
Date: 3 Sep 92 00:12:03 GMT
	<1992Aug25.213340.11415@cascade.Stanford.EDU>
	<1992Aug27.155330.1@scivax.stsci.edu> <Btnso4.E4@news.larc.nasa.gov>
Distribution: na
Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
In-reply-to: patty@alpha.larc.nasa.gov's message of 27 Aug 92 20:24:03 GMT

In article <Btnso4.E4@news.larc.nasa.gov> patty@alpha.larc.nasa.gov (Patty Howell) writes:

   I agree that it's a necessity to try the saddle on the horse! When I was
   buying my dressage saddle, the nearest tack shop with a good selection 
   was about 250 miles away - a little impracticle to either take the horse
   or the saddle. So the next best thing was to make a model of the horse's
   back and barrel. We took a carpenters red chalk line and snapped several
   lines across her back, making sure we kept the lines straight. Next, we
   took coathanger wire and bent them to the proper shapes following those
   lines, as well as one line down the middle of her back. We took them home, 
   and built a "horse's back" out of plywood. That's what we took to the tack 
   shop. Worked great! The only drawback is that it's usually best to let the
   horse move under the saddle to get the best feel for how it fits. So, if 
   you can, take the horse to the saddle or vice-versa, but if not, here's a
   good alternative.

   Patty

When we had an OrthoFlex saddle custom made for my husband's
barrel-shaped Fjord gelding, OrthoFlex sent us directions for making a
cast of the horse's back.  I went to a (human) medical supply house
and got a box of rolls of gauze impregnated with quick-set plaster
(used for setting broken legs).  We then picked a time when the horse
was feeling lazy enough to stand quietly, and proceeded to make him a
"plaster saddle blanket".  Each roll of gauze was dipped into
luke-warm water, squoze out slightly, then unrolled and cut into
strips.  We did a complete layer of slightly-overlapped strips running
across his back, then added a layer of strips parallel to his backbone
(for strength---the plywood effect), then another layer with strips
running across his back.  It takes 2 people---one to dampen the gauze
and unroll the strips, and one to cut them off and smooth them into
place.  We left the resulting cast on him for maybe 15 minutes until
it was reasonably rigid, then lifted it right off (it left only a
slight residue of plaster dust on his hair) and set it in a corner of
the house until it dried fully, then shipped it to OrthoFlex.  My
understanding is that they used this as a "negative", i.e. coated the
inside of it with layers of fiberglas and resins to reconstruct the
exact shape of the horse's back.  However, the cast was quite thin and
uniform---I suspect that it could have been used as is to select
saddles to try on the horse, i.e. most saddle pads would have taken up
more room than the cast did.  In our case, we had to mark the
almost-cylindrical cast to indicate actual top of the horse's back
(easy to locate, with a Fjord's dorsal stripe), but on a horse with
real withers, that probably wouldn't have been necessary.

Marsha Jo Hannah		Murphy must have been a horseman--
La Honda, CA			anything that can go wrong, will!
Newsgroups: rec.equestrian