Saddle Fitting: Consider the humble saddle tree

Monday, September 22nd, 2008 | saddle fitting

“A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.” - Mark Twain

More about trees

Wood spring trees are made by bending laminated wood strips around a form that looks like a horse’s back.  The wood spring tree takes on the shape of the form it is built on.  The shape is then re-inforced by steel bands and a head plate and gullet plate.

There are many other factors beside nominal tree width that affect the fit. Even a tree of suitable shape cannot do the job alone. No matter how much you narrow this tree, something more will be needed to prevent injury to this horse.

Synthetic trees are injection molded, using a plastic-like, nylon composite material.  The material for the tree is poured into a mold and it comes out in one solid piece.  Then its width at the head is established by pushing the points of the tree outward or inward.

In the manufacture of synthetic trees — which dominate in the lower half of the saddle market and are becoming increasingly prevalent even in the rarefied top end — the initial investment in a mold to produce a tree is expensive, but the production cost per tree is low.  This is one of several potent disincentives to producing saddles on many different shapes of tree for many different shapes of horse.

Typically there is a great deal more variety of shapes commercially available in wood spring trees, but this doesn’t mean that any individual saddle manufacturer uses a wide variety of different tree shapes.    From a production standpoint, this is a lot more complicated than it seems on the surface.

For reasons that are quite valid financially if not always beneficial in practical terms, many saddle manufacturers are producing on a single type of tree, which is then adjusted to different nominal widths.   The fundamental point is that the overall shape of the tree is what it is –  variations in width do not necessarily correlate to variations in the whole shape of the tree as the arms (tree points) are widened or narrowed and the nominal tree widths increases or decreases.  Inconveniently, the geometry of trees is actually a lot more profound than that.

Whether or not a particular manufacture chooses to build saddles on a wide variety of tree shapes, the universe of choices in wood spring trees is greater than the choices available in synthetic trees.   Where synthetic trees are used, their selling point seems to be that the material they are made from is more malleable, and therefore it is easier to make serial adjustments to the “width” of the saddle – provided that one is content with defining fit as being all or mostly about the fit through the tree points and not the overall shape and fit of the whole tree.

Simply widening this tree will still not make it a suitable shape for this horse.

Unfortunately, analyzing the suitability of tree shape is not something that figures prominently in many discussions of saddle fitting.  Trees can be either too curvy or too flat for a particular horse’s back, or the rails can be set too steeply and too close together or too flat and too wide apart for a particular horse, all of which can have a profound effect on the horse’s comfort and the evenness of the weight distribution.

Tags: saddle fitting, saddle shape, saddle trees, synthetic trees, wood spring trees

2 Comments to Saddle Fitting: Consider the humble saddle tree

halfpassedout
September 25, 2008

Since the tree is obviously so incredibly important, particularly the shape of the tree, how can saddles with allegedly “adjustable” trees or gullets ever possibly fit correctly? Is one-size-fits-all really one-size-fits-none?

Colleen
September 28, 2008

Hm. this is an excellent question, which I will address in my next blog entry. I hope it generates some discussion because if there is any genuine proof that such a thing can ever work, (with only a couple exceptions that I know of) I would love to be enlightened on the physics of how this can work.

The exceptions that I know of are “alternative technology” saddles such as the WOW saddle from First Thought Equine, and the Reactor Panel saddles.

What makes them different from other adjustable saddles? The first thing is the design concept that parses the saddle into individually adjustable components. The second thing is that both of these designs have made the bearing structure for the horse independent of the bearing structure that the rider is sitting on.

Conceptually this is really quite a brilliant approach, but no new paradigm in any realm of technology is without its practical challenges, and the challenges still to be met appear to be substantial.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.