The key is the tree; it's the part you can't see

This blog is about saddle fitting, or at least my experience of saddle fitting.  It is the product of time in the field and in the factory, seeking, testing, gritting teeth, frothing with excitement, sucking it up in the face of failure, using foul language, getting a little closer, losing the trail, stumbling upon the right trail again; all illuminated over time by enough enlightening “ah-ha!” moments to keep the quest fresh for me year after year.  If you have any questions you would like to see addressed in the blog, please e-mail me at info@advancedsaddlefit.com, and be sure to include Blog in the subject line.

I hope this will become a forum for the lively exchange of ideas, a place for other professional saddle fitters to share the benefits of collective experience, and a destination for the curious consumer looking for a more probing treatment of saddle fitting than the cursory guidelines listed in “The Seven Points of Saddle Fitting” (or the 10 points, or 14.6, or any prime number higher than 23, depending on who is composing the list).

Early in my saddle-fitting career, back when I was tied-in to selling and fitting a single brand of saddle, I began to realize that, without some knowledge of the range of technical capabilities and constraints inherent in the design technology of all saddles, my practical understanding of saddle fitting and of fit solutions for horses would remain cripplingly limited.

As a working professional in this field, I spent far too long wondering in intense frustration why a “wide” saddle that was nominally suitable for a “wide” horse, and appeared by conventional assessment a reasonable fit for that horse, simply would not stay put when ridden, no matter what I tried; or why some horses with identical wither tracings couldn’t even remotely fit into the same saddle; or why the fit of custom saddles “made to template” from a wither tracing or other careful measurements of the equine back turned out quite often to be disastrous on the horse. 

It didn’t take long to realize that there were an awful lot of horses I had no particularly good solution for, even in the premium range of saddles I worked with.  Often, even when I felt that I had the right width and fit for the horse in the saddle the rider had chosen, I was still forced to rely on crafty manipulation of the flocking (I was taught to rely on finicky flocking adjustments) to try to correct problems with the saddle’s balance and stability.

Once upon a time I would have tried to "fix" this problem by stuffing the back panel to level this saddle.

I lived in dread of delivering a special-order saddle that was supposed to fit the horse, indeed must fit the horse, and damn well would fit the horse if I had to flock those panels for hours, to within an inch of their lives.  Something about the whole methodology did not seem right, not to mention how stressful it was to have such a limited range of choices to work with, when saddle fitting is a complex business.

Strangely, I was not very successful in getting convincing answers on this side of the Atlantic to my questions about how saddles are actually supposed to fit and how to get better at fitting them.  So I decided to go straight to the source - to Walsall, in the region of England known as the Black Country.

My home away from home in Walsall

These days Walsall is not actually black, as it apparently was during the Industrial Revolution when it was thoroughly coated in soot; nowadays it’s grimy gray.  Neither is it “the country” by any stretch, and certainly not horse country.  One saddle maker admitted that the closest he gets to a live horse in an average month is when he walks down to the corner betting shop to put a wager on the fifth at Cheltenham. 

But Walsall is the saddle-making center of England, and a mecca for anyone interested in learning about saddles.   For me it continues year after year to be the classroom, the hall of learning, the place to go for the conceptual insight and technical knowledge that underpin my lab work in the field, fitting saddles to horses.

It’s hard for me to imagine how I could become an educated saddle fitter without spending time with saddle makers and tree makers there.  And this is quite odd because almost any saddle maker you talk to in Walsall will give you a completely different story about the right way to do things.

I began to make the pilgrimage to Walsall frequently, to badger saddle makers, more experienced saddle fitters, and tree makers, crassly mining their collective centuries of experience for a fleck or two of precious insight.  Eventually I endured the Society of Master Saddler’s week-long ordeal required as preparation for the assessment to become official as a professional saddle fitter.  (Tip for those of you who would go down this road: If you want to pass the QSF assessment, think about what happens in your real life as a saddle fitter, then say or do the opposite.)

The UK’s Society of Master Saddlers is a sufficiently interesting body that it probably merits its own daytime TV drama.  I’m not going to get bogged down there, however; I’m going to restrict myself to writing about only some of the many aspects of this subject that I feel insufficiently knowledgeable to discourse upon.

In any case, the SMS is the only body in the world that confers internationally-recognized professional saddle fitting credentials.  Becoming officially qualified and eligible for membership in this august body as a professional saddle fitter isn’t necessarily a token of great achievement in this field (trust me on that!), but it is a start: a platform of basic knowledge and procedure, and a useful entrée into the clubby world of British saddle makers.  Making the effort to become qualified (it’s not a small one) scores at least a little street cred for an outsider in Walsall.

As part of my quest for a better range of saddle fit solutions and a deeper understanding of the underlying physical principals in play, I have sought the counsel of many experts in the UK’s saddle making industry over the years.

One was the managing director of a large British saddle tree manufacturer.  An absolutely lovely man, to whom I am immensely grateful for helping me to understand the critical basics of tree design and technology, I hasten to assure him should he hear of this that I was not at all offended by his gentle observation that my grasp of the geometry of tree design remains rudimentary, notwithstanding repetitive tutorials on the subject.   Picture showing two trees together   Two trees; so alike, and yet so vitally different.

If this leaves you wondering whether you are reading a blog on saddle fitting written by someone not particularly well qualified to write it, I’m afraid the answer to that is yes.  Unfortunately, whoever should be writing this instead of me hasn’t done it yet.  Had this knowledge, this deeper way of looking at saddle technology and saddle fit, been readily available when I started in this job, I think that I would have been quite a bit better at it, a lot sooner.

What I have found instead is that, for a variety of reasons, information about saddle fitting that goes beyond unsubstantiated marketing claims and old wives tales isn’t easy to come by.  Even books and articles that help readers identify obvious faults in saddle fit often fail to offer much help or insight into specific solutions.  A genuine variety of good fit solutions for the vast array of different horses we ride these days isn’t easy to come by; but there is a lot to know that will at least help establish a base line for the way we think about fitting saddles.

I hope you will all join in this discussion and bring with you the insight of horse owners, saddle fitters, and others dedicated to doing the best they can for the horses they own or work with.