DIY #TuthFitKit Mold
Does this sound familiar?
"I heard about you from a friend as I was searching for a saddle for this horse, and have followed your Facebook page for a bit. I have a ranch cutter made by ----- Saddle Company, and it sored him after a while and I had a saddle fitter come out. She was able to take wither tracings and we tried a bunch of different pads but it didn’t work out. I bought a stock ranch cutter from another Saddle Company that was a different tree and that didn’t work out either. In the meantime a friend let me ride a lady McCall Wade and I thought it fit well but couldn’t find one with those specs to purchase, so I sent the other saddle back in exchange for a custom with the same specs as the McCall but after riding it for a while it doesn’t fit either."
"Different saddles seem to not fit for different reasons and at this point I have a bunch of saddles I need to sell and rather than play games with trying various stock stuff and shipping back and forth and dealing with scammers I would prefer to use a fit kit like yours and get a custom tree I know will fit."
What you have described is on par with about 90% of our clients experiences. After all the time at anguish, they end up going with the full custom fit in order to solve the problem. Most of our custom clients have bought, tried and traded in anywhere from 3 to 10 saddles off of the rack with “stock or semi custom / stock trees”.
Many have even tried the wither tracings. This is typically only about 30% - 50% effective - depending on the horse and his / her structure.. some horses can get by with a 50% fit based off of padding, etc. But it is always a roll of the dice. It can help, but it just does not provide enough information of the horses entire back structure, including rock, twist, etc. We do not use them for fitting for this reason. Our kit / mold gives all of this info. We also asked for pictures of the mold on the horse’s back along with multiple pictures of the horse for conformation questions that we may have throughout the process. There are about seven things that we look at in reference to the horses back. This map that we get back from you shows every bit of it, including width, height, wither structure, back structure, rock, twist and length of bar.
There are just a few tree manufacturers that make trees for all of the saddle builders in the country. Very few saddle builders make their own trees. These builders usually have a list that is 2 to 3 years for customs and prices typically stark around $5000 and can very easily go up to $10,000. Each saddle builder also has their own specs and measurements that they like to go by. Every tree company out there is different. What the numbers mean to one is usually an inch or half an inch different to others just based off of where they measure it from and how they build their saddles to a particular tree. It is still more than art than it is a science. Fortunately for 80% ~ 90% of the horses out there, one fit can kind of work. Yours sounds like it is in the other 10% to 20% that is just not anywhere close to standard. Owners and builders can throw all the numbers around like gullet, width, height, rock, twist, etc. at each other and it really doesn’t mean anything unless it can be translated into something that a saddle tree builder can specifically use. It’s just about impossible with so much ambiguity / difference amongst different tree and saddle builders in the industry.
We are also not immune to this, with as much custom fitting as we do, we always need a mold of the horses back in order to get the correct fit.
It is really the only way - short of having a horse standing in our shop and trying multiple trees on their back. Most folks do not have access to a tree builder locally. It really is the tree and not the saddle maker or manufacturer that you need first. Even if there is a saddle maker close, most makers do not have enough trees in different/varying sizes to be able to fit every horse correctly and so they wind up “almost” getting it right, only to find out later that all that time and money spent was still not right. Nobody is happy in the end.
It would be nice if our horses could talk to us and tell us where it hurts and what is pinching before it turns into a larger issue and they are completely sore/scalded, etc.
For most of our clients, this is the last resort. They are worn out and have already purchased so many saddles that they have lost hope in fitting their horse correctly. In the end, our clients are always very relieved that they were able to get the correct fit.
I hope that this helps explain a little more about what we do and why we need the mold to fit any horse correctly. We have a 99% rate when using our #TruthFitKit.
If a custom fit tree is deemed necessary there will be a $175 fee for the custom tree on your saddle invoice.
We can also determine if one of our standard Narrow, Medium or Wide saddle Trees will fit your horse and narrow down which one for a semi-custom fit!
If you have any further questions please contact us at 575-616-5600 to further discuss. Otherwise we will be in contact with you upon purchase.
