Fair warning-there's a rant here today.
I swear. I'm getting fed up with my childish dorm mates. OK, granted, they're 18 and 20. But still, there's no need to prank call someone else's friends when you have a head cold and pretend to be a guy because you vaguely sound like one. Especially when you're too feminine to carry the ruse with verbage. I'm still shaking my head over that one. It's ridiculous. Frick and frack are really starting to irritate the hell out of me. I even refrained from going out to the barn for extra work tonight because I knew they were out there.
And I really need to go out to the barn because I'm quite close to passing my clips. Which have been frusterating the hell out of me. I've drawn probably 3 dozen clips trying to get the technique down. Now I just have to make a pair of front shoes with toe clips and a pair of hind shoes with quarter clips. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get them knocked out tomorrow, though, because the dimwits usually go out somewhere Friday nights. Despite having barn work on Saturdays, of course.
I also managed to completely knock out two front feet for shoeing in two hours today. Yay! I'm seeing improvement in my shoeing ability, not only in skill but in stamina and ability to stay under the horse. And I know we have more dental floats tomorrow. We watched a video this morning on floating teeth and they let us know that there's 9 floats tomorrow. So we'll be busy. There's seven of us that are on the list for floats tomorrow, me, Park, Alberto, Jade, Jack, Collin, and Sarah. Everyone else either isn't in the 12 week program or hasn't been here long enough yet to get diverted for floats. You have to have been here for 4 weeks before you get to try out floating teeth.
There's 16 students right now, too. Six are new for this week, including another female student named Petra from Holland. She and I get along much better than I do with the idiots. I just don't respect them, that's the bottom line. Petra is closer to my age and that helps, too. We also have a student from Venezuela, two cousins from the Big Easy, one from Kentucky, and I don't remember off hand where the last one's from. Which also means there's lots of tool boxes in the tool room! It also means there's lots of variety in personalities. Fortunately, I seem to get along with nearly all of them, so that's a good thing. And really, I get along with Sarah pretty well. Just...Isabelle...*sigh*.
Anyway, I guess I ought to step off the soapbox. Overall, I feel I'm doing pretty well. And the cold I came down with is resolving through plenty of rest and a little pseudoephedrine, so I'm coming back up to speed. Also, exciting thing! On Tuesday, I got to trim the feet of a thoroughbred yearling that's bound for the racetrack! For those of you that know me, you'll understand how cool that was for me. I got to talk to the owner, too, and while she didn't give any specifics, she did let drop that the yearling's sire is a record holder out at Hollywood Park. Which means his pedigree is probably pretty decent. He had a lot of attitude, so I suspect he'll be pretty competitive. Whether or not he'll have the speed to match is still to be seen. It was pretty awesome, though, to be able to work on a potential like that.
I believe I'll call it a night at this point. It's coming up on my bedtime and 6 am comes earlier than I'd like it to.
This is me, signing off.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Bruising and boogers
Ugh, I think I'm coming down with a cold or a sinus infection or a massive allergy attack or something. Not sure yet, but I woke up this morning and could only breathe out of one side of my nose. Slight sinus headache and some congestion in the nasal area. And phlegm. BUT! Despite this, I was out in the barn with everyone else today, acquiring new bruises on my arms. All week I've had two feet, fronts Monday through Wednesday, hinds yesterday and today. And every time the horse tries to take a foot away from me, I end up with new bruises. I have a pretty big bruise on the inside of my left thigh, about 3 inches by 3 inches, where a mare on Wednesday pulled me around. Today's horse decided I needed a new array of bruising on the underside of my left arm from where he drove his hock repeatedly into my arm while trying to take his foot away. So yeah. Some new aches and pains.
The upside to all this is that I'm getting better at my skills and competance, which means I'm also getting somewhat faster at what I'm doing. The work is hard and physically demanding, but I'm seeing an improvement. Which means that if I can see it, it must be fairly significant. Now I just have to improve on my forge skills. I'm working on drawing clips on shoes. What's a clip, you might ask? It's a triangular protrusion hammered at a roughly 90 degree angle from the metal of the shoe. Typically, shoes with clips have one clip at the very toe of the shoe for fronts or two clips at the front of the quarters on a hind shoe. To make these, you take a shoe, put a dent in it with either a bob punch tool or a cross pein hammer, and then draw out the metal into a triangle by hammering the dent against the anvil. When the shoe is put on, the clip stays against the outside of the hoof wall and helps keep the hoof protected better as well as helping to keep the shoe on and in place better.
Mind you, clips are applied through hot shoeing, which I got a chance to do yesterday. All I can say is don't inhale the smoke that comes off the foot...yuck! Just like it sounds, the shoe is hot when you first apply it to the foot, so the hoof is burned. This provides a better seat for the shoe when it's applied. Stinks like burning hair, though, and the smoke permeates your clothes worse than cigarette smoke. After the shoe is burned on, it's taken and dunked in the water trough before we actually nail it on. So there's no risk of burning ourselves while nailing it on. You just have to be careful while you're setting the shoe. It doesn't hurt the horse, but it's a little uncomfortable to have something that hot on the bottom of your foot. It would be like heating up a paperclip and putting it against the top of your fingernail for a moment. Eventually it would burn through, but you only hold it in place long enough to get a good seat for the shoe. Maybe 10 seconds or so.
This one's going to be a little shorter than previous posts. A little extra sleep tonight will be good for me and make tomorrow easier.
This is me, signing off.
The upside to all this is that I'm getting better at my skills and competance, which means I'm also getting somewhat faster at what I'm doing. The work is hard and physically demanding, but I'm seeing an improvement. Which means that if I can see it, it must be fairly significant. Now I just have to improve on my forge skills. I'm working on drawing clips on shoes. What's a clip, you might ask? It's a triangular protrusion hammered at a roughly 90 degree angle from the metal of the shoe. Typically, shoes with clips have one clip at the very toe of the shoe for fronts or two clips at the front of the quarters on a hind shoe. To make these, you take a shoe, put a dent in it with either a bob punch tool or a cross pein hammer, and then draw out the metal into a triangle by hammering the dent against the anvil. When the shoe is put on, the clip stays against the outside of the hoof wall and helps keep the hoof protected better as well as helping to keep the shoe on and in place better.
Mind you, clips are applied through hot shoeing, which I got a chance to do yesterday. All I can say is don't inhale the smoke that comes off the foot...yuck! Just like it sounds, the shoe is hot when you first apply it to the foot, so the hoof is burned. This provides a better seat for the shoe when it's applied. Stinks like burning hair, though, and the smoke permeates your clothes worse than cigarette smoke. After the shoe is burned on, it's taken and dunked in the water trough before we actually nail it on. So there's no risk of burning ourselves while nailing it on. You just have to be careful while you're setting the shoe. It doesn't hurt the horse, but it's a little uncomfortable to have something that hot on the bottom of your foot. It would be like heating up a paperclip and putting it against the top of your fingernail for a moment. Eventually it would burn through, but you only hold it in place long enough to get a good seat for the shoe. Maybe 10 seconds or so.
This one's going to be a little shorter than previous posts. A little extra sleep tonight will be good for me and make tomorrow easier.
This is me, signing off.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Eau de Equine Dentistry
For the uninitiated, let me state for the record that horse slobber has a unique odor that stays with you when you've had your hands in their mouths. Yes, I'm talking about floating teeth. What is that, you might ask? Well, the way a horse's mouth is, they wear their back teeth unevenly. The upper teeth wear more on the inside than the outside and vice versa for the lower teeth. And so the teeth form sharp edges on the side that recieves less wear. These edges need to be taken off so that the horse's mouth is more comfortable and they don't cut up the inside of their cheeks or tongue. Taking off these edges is called floating the teeth.
Now, I also know the next question that's going to be asked: How is this accomplished? A smart ass would simply say stick a rasp in the horse's mouth and take care of it. Which is almost correct. There's also a sedative and a speculum involved, though. The horse is given a mild sedative to relax them. It doesn't put them out all the way and they can still react if you piss them off. For the vet hospital people, it's a half cc of Domisedan given IV. You then stuff a speculum into their mouth so they don't bite you. This looks like a huge metal and leather contraption with ratchets on each side. There are two metal plates that the front teeth rest on and the ratchets keep the mouth open so you can work on the back teeth. You then stick a long handled rasp into the horse's mouth and file off the sharp edges. And you check your progress by sticking your hand into the horse's mouth and feeling the teeth. Mind you, this whole operation is done blind, since you can't see into the mouth while you're working on it. Of course, the horse isn't completely out and the speculum doesn't open the mouth wide enough to keep the horse from being unable to chew. So while you're working in the mouth, there's the added fun of the horse biting down on the rasp and pinching your fingers as you check your progress. Yep, the lasting perfume of horse spittle gets all over your hands and halfway up to your elbows as you feel blindly around in a horse's mouth, checking for sharp edges and trying not to get gnawed on.
In other matters, Hobbit had a great question about the reason for soleing out a horse's hooves at the end of post #2. In case some of you missed it, she asked if soleing out was like using a pumice stone on your own feet. The answer is actually more complicated than it might appear at first. I had to think about it for a few days to figure out how to explain it, because it's really a form and function answer. And the best way to explain it is with analogy and comparison. Bear with me on this one.
In a human, unless they have exceptionally flat feet, the arch of the foot doesn't touch the ground. This is because the arch is a point of expansion for the foot. When moving at speed, the foot spreads and the arch flexes toward the ground, thus absorbing and dispursing the shock and concussion of impact. This is also why flat footed people often have foot pain, because the whole of the foot impacts the ground and there's no place for the concussion to spread to.
Now to compare this to the equine foot (temporarily ignoring the physiological fact that humans are plantigrades and horses are unguligrades...I'll explain that later). In the horse's foot, the sole is like the arch of the foot. It doesn't touch the ground normally since the horse walks only on the hoof wall and frog of the foot. It also allows for a point of expansion as the horse travels at speed. The sole flexes toward the ground, helping to absorb the concussion of impact. But unlike the human foot, the sole keeps growing. Thus, a farrier has to pare out the dead sole to allow for the live sole to have a place to expand to.
Mind you, this is only one of many reasons why a horse's feet should be taken care of. Another reason is that like human hair and fingernails, the hoof doesn't quit growing. Especially since it's made of the same material as hair and fingernails. If the hoof isn't trimmed or worn away, it'll keep growing out of control. I've seen the result of this. The donkey had to be held down and the excess hoof cut off with a hacksaw before the feet could be worked on. The hooves had turned at right angles during growth and were growing out in front of the feet like skis. And farrier's tools are much more burly than what we'd use on our own feet. I certainly wouldn't want to use a kitchen cleaver to dig out a corn! Let me put it this way: To check the sharpness of our hoof knives, we routinely shave a small section of our arm hair off with it. If it cuts cleanly the first time, it's sharp enough.
Oh, that plantigrade/digitigrade/unguligrade thing. This one's pretty quick to explain. Humans and apes walk on their whole foot. This is called plantigrade. Carnivores and predators tend to be digitigrade, which means they walk on their tiptoes. What would be a human's heel is a predator's hock. Herbivores and prey animals tend to walk on just the very tips of their toes, which is unguligrade. This is equivalent to a ballerina in toe shoes, with just the point of the toes touching the ground. And in fact, all the toes are fused into one huge toe, for added strength in the bony structures. That's a different conversation, though.
Anyway, no new particularly significant injuries to report. Just some bruising, which is really becoming the norm around here. As usual, if there's anything specific anyone wants to know about the fun and havok happening here just post a comment or send me an email. I'll get back to everyone as I can and hopefully enlighten the unwashed masses in the process. *grin*
This is me, signing off.
Now, I also know the next question that's going to be asked: How is this accomplished? A smart ass would simply say stick a rasp in the horse's mouth and take care of it. Which is almost correct. There's also a sedative and a speculum involved, though. The horse is given a mild sedative to relax them. It doesn't put them out all the way and they can still react if you piss them off. For the vet hospital people, it's a half cc of Domisedan given IV. You then stuff a speculum into their mouth so they don't bite you. This looks like a huge metal and leather contraption with ratchets on each side. There are two metal plates that the front teeth rest on and the ratchets keep the mouth open so you can work on the back teeth. You then stick a long handled rasp into the horse's mouth and file off the sharp edges. And you check your progress by sticking your hand into the horse's mouth and feeling the teeth. Mind you, this whole operation is done blind, since you can't see into the mouth while you're working on it. Of course, the horse isn't completely out and the speculum doesn't open the mouth wide enough to keep the horse from being unable to chew. So while you're working in the mouth, there's the added fun of the horse biting down on the rasp and pinching your fingers as you check your progress. Yep, the lasting perfume of horse spittle gets all over your hands and halfway up to your elbows as you feel blindly around in a horse's mouth, checking for sharp edges and trying not to get gnawed on.
In other matters, Hobbit had a great question about the reason for soleing out a horse's hooves at the end of post #2. In case some of you missed it, she asked if soleing out was like using a pumice stone on your own feet. The answer is actually more complicated than it might appear at first. I had to think about it for a few days to figure out how to explain it, because it's really a form and function answer. And the best way to explain it is with analogy and comparison. Bear with me on this one.
In a human, unless they have exceptionally flat feet, the arch of the foot doesn't touch the ground. This is because the arch is a point of expansion for the foot. When moving at speed, the foot spreads and the arch flexes toward the ground, thus absorbing and dispursing the shock and concussion of impact. This is also why flat footed people often have foot pain, because the whole of the foot impacts the ground and there's no place for the concussion to spread to.
Now to compare this to the equine foot (temporarily ignoring the physiological fact that humans are plantigrades and horses are unguligrades...I'll explain that later). In the horse's foot, the sole is like the arch of the foot. It doesn't touch the ground normally since the horse walks only on the hoof wall and frog of the foot. It also allows for a point of expansion as the horse travels at speed. The sole flexes toward the ground, helping to absorb the concussion of impact. But unlike the human foot, the sole keeps growing. Thus, a farrier has to pare out the dead sole to allow for the live sole to have a place to expand to.
Mind you, this is only one of many reasons why a horse's feet should be taken care of. Another reason is that like human hair and fingernails, the hoof doesn't quit growing. Especially since it's made of the same material as hair and fingernails. If the hoof isn't trimmed or worn away, it'll keep growing out of control. I've seen the result of this. The donkey had to be held down and the excess hoof cut off with a hacksaw before the feet could be worked on. The hooves had turned at right angles during growth and were growing out in front of the feet like skis. And farrier's tools are much more burly than what we'd use on our own feet. I certainly wouldn't want to use a kitchen cleaver to dig out a corn! Let me put it this way: To check the sharpness of our hoof knives, we routinely shave a small section of our arm hair off with it. If it cuts cleanly the first time, it's sharp enough.
Oh, that plantigrade/digitigrade/unguligrade thing. This one's pretty quick to explain. Humans and apes walk on their whole foot. This is called plantigrade. Carnivores and predators tend to be digitigrade, which means they walk on their tiptoes. What would be a human's heel is a predator's hock. Herbivores and prey animals tend to walk on just the very tips of their toes, which is unguligrade. This is equivalent to a ballerina in toe shoes, with just the point of the toes touching the ground. And in fact, all the toes are fused into one huge toe, for added strength in the bony structures. That's a different conversation, though.
Anyway, no new particularly significant injuries to report. Just some bruising, which is really becoming the norm around here. As usual, if there's anything specific anyone wants to know about the fun and havok happening here just post a comment or send me an email. I'll get back to everyone as I can and hopefully enlighten the unwashed masses in the process. *grin*
This is me, signing off.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Boneheaded manuevers
I burned the ends of my fingers yesterday. My index finger, middle finger, and ring finger on my right hand across the distal palmar aspect of each, to be exact. It was pretty stupid. I was trying to demonstrate to one of the new people how to hold a forepunch that he was working on. Somehow, I didn't connect the fact that he was not touching it to the fact that it was still hot. I mean, it wasn't glowing or anything like that so it didn't look hot. So, like a total bonehead, I reached out and started to grab the thing. Thankfully, I was wearing my gloves or I would have seared the hell out of my palm, too. I jerked my hand away pretty fast, so the damage wasn't too severe. Just a nice blister across those three fingers. The barn has a great first aid kit, mind you. I slathered my fingers in burn gel pretty quick and slapped band-aids across the three fingers. The moral of the story is that just because it's not glowing doean't mean it's not searing hot. lol!
In other news, I've had really good days in shoeing recently. I got my two basic front shoes approved, so now I'm working on forging a pair of basic hind shoes. I've been able to stay under the horses longer, so I've been getting a lot more done in one go. And I'm getting quite good at fitting shoes to feet and top dressing the hooves. I still have some problems driving the nails, but I'm improving. And I think I'm getting a good feel for how much hoof to trim off, so that's a good thing too. Overall, I can tell I've improved. Now I just have to put all of it together and get my endurance up so I can stay under a horse long enough to do more than one foot.
We had some real asshole horses today. A Tennessee Walker stud that was trying to impress the ladies, a mare that didn't want her back feet done, a pair of paints that wouldn't behave, just a hell of a selection today. We got them done, but some folks got shoved around today. Jade had to go to the doctor, but part of that was because he's also a bull rider and had gotten bucked from a bull on Sunday and hurt his ribs. He was the one that worked on the mare with the hind foot issues. I did one of her front feet and she was fidgety for that. But she just out and out didn't want her hinds done. She shoved Jade around pretty hard and his ribs were really hurting him tonight, so last I heard he was heading for a doctor. I'm guessing he gets Vicodin...
I know some of you wanted pictures, so I'll put a few up here. Today's photos are of the barn where we do all the shoeing and forge work, the pair of shoes I made that got approved, and what happens to someone's hand when they accidentally hit it with a hammer. The close up of the anvil is the one I specifically use. We each have one that we pick out for our own personal use for the duration of our course.
So there you have it. This is where I spend my days, from 9 am until 4 pm basically. As usual, if there's something you'd like to see or know more about, let me know and I'll try and get to it.
This is me, signing off.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
When there's nothing on TV
So, here I am again. There's nothing on the TV here, since we only get limited channels. NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CW, something called Ion channel, and not much else. One Spanish language channel and 5 religion channels. And a storm last week knocked out our power for a while which somehow messed up the TV so that the color is all in shades of green. The other two girls are out somewhere, having dinner with some of the guys as far as I understand. Don't know, I wasn't invited. Yeah, fun on a stick...
Other than that, though, I had a pretty good day both yesterday and today. Yesterday I shoed a complete hind foot from start to finish. YAY! And today, I worked on trims and didn't get assigned a shoe. I was pretty stiff and kind of sore today, so I didn't mind at all. Plus, yesterday's foot was on a horse that had seriously overgrown feet with lots of thrush in the foot, so it felt really good to be able to help the horse feel better and walk better. What is "thrush", you might ask? It's a bacterial infection in the foot caused by standing in unclean conditions and not having the feet cleaned out regularly. Thrush smells really bad and looks like black crumbly goo. If left untreated, it can infect the entire foot and cause lameness. As it was, on the horse yesterday, the hoof was quite dried out and brittle while I was paring it out and the smell was really bad. On most horses, when you trim a foot up for a shoe, you take off about a half inch or so of the hoof wall that has grown. It's like trimming fingernails, as it's made of keratin just like hair or nails on a person. On the horse yesterday, I had to take off probably close to two inches of hoof wall, just to bring the foot into a good shape and length to match where the sole was at. I know, that's a lot of terminology...so Google it if you're confused. =P
Long story short, I felt that yesterday went really well. Today was a good day, too, since I only trimmed 4 feet. Hinds on one horse, and fronts on another. Trims are a lot earier, since you don't have to take off as much hoof and there's no shoe to nail on. A lot of times, there's no shoe to take off, either. The horses today were really good, too. They stood still and for the most part, didn't try to take their feet away. And I felt like I'm really getting the hang of what I'm supposed to be doing. Now I just have to work on my endurance so I can stay under the horse for longer amounts of time and get the foot done quicker.
For those of you wondering, I'll list out the steps involved in shoeing a horse from start to finish. There's a lot of things, but most of them are not singular thoughts. You'll understand that better as I list everything out. First, the old shoe has to come off. Using the hammer and clinch cutter, you have to straighten the clinches that are on the outside of the hoof wall. The clinch is the part of the nail that can be seen and is folded over to hold the shoe on. Once those are taken care of, you pull the shoe off using the pullers. These look a lot like the hoof nippers, so the way to tell them apart is to check the handles. The pullers have one round knob on the end of the handles while the nippers don't. I'll get to nippers later. So, you grab the shoe with the pullers and then with a jerk (or several!) toward the toe of the hoof, you work off the old shoe. Once the shoe is off, you can clean up the hoof and get it ready for a new shoe. You have to pare out the sole with the hoof knife next, removing the dead sole and exposing the live sole. This doesn't hurt the horse unless you take off too much sole and quick them. You know you've quicked a horse when they start to bleed. To avoid this, it's best to check the sole by pushing on it: If the sole is soft, stop paring! The sole is typically hard to compress with your fingers, so if you can compress the sole, it means you're close to quicking them. Then, you trim off the hoof wall with the nippers. These are quite sharp in order to be able to cut through the hoof wall and you never want to cut metal with them as it will gouge the cutting edges and you'll have to buy new nippers. The pullers are great for cutting metal, though, and will cut off the ends of nails pretty easily. That's later, though. So after the nipper run, you check to see how level the hoof is. Not only level between front and back but level side to side, too. This is where we typically are thinking of a lot of different things at once. You are mentally sizing up the hoof and seeing where you need to take more off to make that hoof level across the face of the sole and balanced with the ground so the horse doesn't stand unevenly on that foot. You're also checking the angle the foot sits with the ground and the length of the toe so that when you do the other foot of the pair (front or hind), the length and angle match between both feet. To make this happen, you pull out your rasp and file off what needs filing to make the foot level and balanced. Once this is done, you go back to the hoof knife and take off just a little more sole near the hoof wall so that none of the sole is having pressure put on it. Horses don't really stand on their soles much, mostly just on the hoof wall, so you don't want the shoe to rest on the sole. Next, you have to shape the shoe to the foot (I'm presuming the use of a premade (keg) shoe, otherwise the next step here would be to craft the shoe). You lay the shoe on the foot and look it over to see where adjustments need to be made. There's no such thing as the perfect foot, so pretty much every shoe needs tweaking. And front feet aren't the same shape as hind feet, so you have to shape the shoe with that in mind as well. Shaping the shoe involves heading to an anvil and methodically banging the hell out of the shoe with what is basically a small sledgehammer until it fits the way it's supposed to. It's hard to describe this part, since each shoe is shaped a little differently to each foot and different parts of the anvil achieve a different result when crafting on it. And then you check it against the foot and you spen a while walking between the foot and the anvil as you tweak the shoe into the right shape. It should fit the foot squarely all around, but you also have to mentally take into account the fact that the hoof wall can be flared out so the shoe needs to fit a shape that exists in your head. Flare is removed after the shoe is nailed on. So once the shoe fits satisfactorily, you drive two nails, one on each side and typically the second to last hole toward the heel in each shoe. The ends of the nails are either bent over toward the bottom of the foot or twisted off completely. Once the shoe is secured, you bring the foot forward and put it on the hoof stand. Now you top dress the hoof. This is when you rasp off the flare and bring the hoof back into a good shape. The outer wall of the hoof should be smooth and free from bumps or blemishes. This is where you make the foot into the mental shape from earlier. Once the foot looks nice on the outside, you drive four more nails into the shoe, two on each side, and the ends again bent over or twisted off. Then you set the clinches. There's a device called a clinch block that looks like a wedge of metal with a flat top. Some people have made their own, though, that are just a strip of metal folded up a third of the length and bent over at the top into a hook that drapes over the hand. Either way, you rest the flat part of the clinch block against the end of the nail and smack the head of the nail a few times with the hammer. This starts the nail folding over into a clinch. If the ends of the nails weren't twisted off (and sometimes if they were but are still too long), they are clipped off with the pullers. Then the foot is returned to the hoof stand and the clinches are set with the clincher. The clincher is a funny looking tool, with one side of the jaws making a rounded 90 degree turn upward. This is the side that sits on the outside of the hoof wall against the clinch while the other side of the jaws is braced against the head of the nail. The handles are squeezed and the clinch is folded down. Sometimes the clinch also needs a couple of taps with the hammer to make sure it's set. The face of the clinch is then lightly rasped to make sure it's not jagged. The wall of the hoof is them gone over with a sanding block to tidy it up and make it look nice. That's a lot of steps to think about, huh?
I've had a request to put up some pictures of the facilities here, so I'll try and get some of those taken care of next time. Feel free to post comments of anything you really want to see or know about and I'll do my best to get that information into a future post.
This is me, signing off.
Other than that, though, I had a pretty good day both yesterday and today. Yesterday I shoed a complete hind foot from start to finish. YAY! And today, I worked on trims and didn't get assigned a shoe. I was pretty stiff and kind of sore today, so I didn't mind at all. Plus, yesterday's foot was on a horse that had seriously overgrown feet with lots of thrush in the foot, so it felt really good to be able to help the horse feel better and walk better. What is "thrush", you might ask? It's a bacterial infection in the foot caused by standing in unclean conditions and not having the feet cleaned out regularly. Thrush smells really bad and looks like black crumbly goo. If left untreated, it can infect the entire foot and cause lameness. As it was, on the horse yesterday, the hoof was quite dried out and brittle while I was paring it out and the smell was really bad. On most horses, when you trim a foot up for a shoe, you take off about a half inch or so of the hoof wall that has grown. It's like trimming fingernails, as it's made of keratin just like hair or nails on a person. On the horse yesterday, I had to take off probably close to two inches of hoof wall, just to bring the foot into a good shape and length to match where the sole was at. I know, that's a lot of terminology...so Google it if you're confused. =P
Long story short, I felt that yesterday went really well. Today was a good day, too, since I only trimmed 4 feet. Hinds on one horse, and fronts on another. Trims are a lot earier, since you don't have to take off as much hoof and there's no shoe to nail on. A lot of times, there's no shoe to take off, either. The horses today were really good, too. They stood still and for the most part, didn't try to take their feet away. And I felt like I'm really getting the hang of what I'm supposed to be doing. Now I just have to work on my endurance so I can stay under the horse for longer amounts of time and get the foot done quicker.
For those of you wondering, I'll list out the steps involved in shoeing a horse from start to finish. There's a lot of things, but most of them are not singular thoughts. You'll understand that better as I list everything out. First, the old shoe has to come off. Using the hammer and clinch cutter, you have to straighten the clinches that are on the outside of the hoof wall. The clinch is the part of the nail that can be seen and is folded over to hold the shoe on. Once those are taken care of, you pull the shoe off using the pullers. These look a lot like the hoof nippers, so the way to tell them apart is to check the handles. The pullers have one round knob on the end of the handles while the nippers don't. I'll get to nippers later. So, you grab the shoe with the pullers and then with a jerk (or several!) toward the toe of the hoof, you work off the old shoe. Once the shoe is off, you can clean up the hoof and get it ready for a new shoe. You have to pare out the sole with the hoof knife next, removing the dead sole and exposing the live sole. This doesn't hurt the horse unless you take off too much sole and quick them. You know you've quicked a horse when they start to bleed. To avoid this, it's best to check the sole by pushing on it: If the sole is soft, stop paring! The sole is typically hard to compress with your fingers, so if you can compress the sole, it means you're close to quicking them. Then, you trim off the hoof wall with the nippers. These are quite sharp in order to be able to cut through the hoof wall and you never want to cut metal with them as it will gouge the cutting edges and you'll have to buy new nippers. The pullers are great for cutting metal, though, and will cut off the ends of nails pretty easily. That's later, though. So after the nipper run, you check to see how level the hoof is. Not only level between front and back but level side to side, too. This is where we typically are thinking of a lot of different things at once. You are mentally sizing up the hoof and seeing where you need to take more off to make that hoof level across the face of the sole and balanced with the ground so the horse doesn't stand unevenly on that foot. You're also checking the angle the foot sits with the ground and the length of the toe so that when you do the other foot of the pair (front or hind), the length and angle match between both feet. To make this happen, you pull out your rasp and file off what needs filing to make the foot level and balanced. Once this is done, you go back to the hoof knife and take off just a little more sole near the hoof wall so that none of the sole is having pressure put on it. Horses don't really stand on their soles much, mostly just on the hoof wall, so you don't want the shoe to rest on the sole. Next, you have to shape the shoe to the foot (I'm presuming the use of a premade (keg) shoe, otherwise the next step here would be to craft the shoe). You lay the shoe on the foot and look it over to see where adjustments need to be made. There's no such thing as the perfect foot, so pretty much every shoe needs tweaking. And front feet aren't the same shape as hind feet, so you have to shape the shoe with that in mind as well. Shaping the shoe involves heading to an anvil and methodically banging the hell out of the shoe with what is basically a small sledgehammer until it fits the way it's supposed to. It's hard to describe this part, since each shoe is shaped a little differently to each foot and different parts of the anvil achieve a different result when crafting on it. And then you check it against the foot and you spen a while walking between the foot and the anvil as you tweak the shoe into the right shape. It should fit the foot squarely all around, but you also have to mentally take into account the fact that the hoof wall can be flared out so the shoe needs to fit a shape that exists in your head. Flare is removed after the shoe is nailed on. So once the shoe fits satisfactorily, you drive two nails, one on each side and typically the second to last hole toward the heel in each shoe. The ends of the nails are either bent over toward the bottom of the foot or twisted off completely. Once the shoe is secured, you bring the foot forward and put it on the hoof stand. Now you top dress the hoof. This is when you rasp off the flare and bring the hoof back into a good shape. The outer wall of the hoof should be smooth and free from bumps or blemishes. This is where you make the foot into the mental shape from earlier. Once the foot looks nice on the outside, you drive four more nails into the shoe, two on each side, and the ends again bent over or twisted off. Then you set the clinches. There's a device called a clinch block that looks like a wedge of metal with a flat top. Some people have made their own, though, that are just a strip of metal folded up a third of the length and bent over at the top into a hook that drapes over the hand. Either way, you rest the flat part of the clinch block against the end of the nail and smack the head of the nail a few times with the hammer. This starts the nail folding over into a clinch. If the ends of the nails weren't twisted off (and sometimes if they were but are still too long), they are clipped off with the pullers. Then the foot is returned to the hoof stand and the clinches are set with the clincher. The clincher is a funny looking tool, with one side of the jaws making a rounded 90 degree turn upward. This is the side that sits on the outside of the hoof wall against the clinch while the other side of the jaws is braced against the head of the nail. The handles are squeezed and the clinch is folded down. Sometimes the clinch also needs a couple of taps with the hammer to make sure it's set. The face of the clinch is then lightly rasped to make sure it's not jagged. The wall of the hoof is them gone over with a sanding block to tidy it up and make it look nice. That's a lot of steps to think about, huh?
I've had a request to put up some pictures of the facilities here, so I'll try and get some of those taken care of next time. Feel free to post comments of anything you really want to see or know about and I'll do my best to get that information into a future post.
This is me, signing off.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Finally, as promised
So! Here I am at the Oklahoma Horseshoeing School. It's Thursday night of my third week and this place is still kicking my ass. There's good days and bad days. Usually the good days are at the beginning of the week and the bad days at the end, since I'm tired and sore by that point. I'm still only able to shoe one hoof a day, though I hope to be able to take up 2 hooves at the beginning of next week. It depends on how well I do and what the instructors assign to me. At the moment, I'm really friggin' tired and sore. My knees didn't bother me until this week, so I'm taking a couple of Aleves now with breakfast to complement my nightly ibuprofins and glucosamines.
Today wasn't that great of a day. The horse I was supposed to put a shoe on was huge, the size of a small draft horse. And they assigned me a hind foot, which is heavy. I had a lot of problems holding the foot to work on it and the damn horse kept trying to tug the hoof out of my grip. I quicked him with a nail, too. I got so frusterated that the instructors had another student nail the shoe on for me and I finished the clinches. So yeah, not one of my best days...
How does a typical day go, you might ask? Well, I wake up at 6 am so I can make class time at 7 am. For the first two weeks, I was in the beginning class, so I had class every morning. Now that I'm in the advanced class, we're in the forge for an hour instead of class on Tuesday and Thursday. Then we have an hour break for breakfast and dorm cleanup. At 9 am we have to be out in the shoeing barn. We're there for 3 hours, then lunch for an hour at noon, then another 3 hours out in the barn. By the end of class, everyone's tired and sweaty, so typically I go back to the dorm and relax for a bit before taking a shower and doing homework. Yes, there's homework. And tests, too. But that part's been easy for me.
The hard part is the actual shoeing. It's an unnatural posture. I mean, how long can you stand pigeontoed and knock-kneed, crouched at the knees and bent over at the waist? Then, hold a horse's leg either between your knees or in your lap. Mind you, not all horses will stand still while you work on them, so factor in getting tugged and shoved around, too. The forge work isn't too hard. Mostly, it's just about understanding which part of the anvil will have what effect when you hammer a piece of hot steel against it. Part of the curriculum is making a variety of shoes and shoeing tools out of stock. I'm working on that still, but I'm figuring it out pretty well so far. I'm just deliberate in learning, which means I'm a slow worker. I've got another 9 1/2 weeks still, so I cautiously optimistic that I'll pick up everything I need to learn.
On the positive side, everyone here is very nice and helpful. Two of the students, Billy and Marvin, graduate this Saturday. Makayla and Blake were the graduates last week. It's nice to be able to look at the more advanced students and see what I'll be working on in 2 or 3 weeks time. The newer students are making me feel slow, though. Sarah is only on her second week and she's already done 2 feet in a day. Then again, she's only 18 and I'm closing in on 34. And Jack is already making handmade hind shoes, which is the next shoe from where I'm at. He's also in his second week. Isabelle and Tim were the students that started this week. We also have Park, who's a student from Korea. He doesn't speak a lot of English, so conversing with him is interesting at times. But he's a good fellow. There's also Alberto, who's two weeks ahead of me. He's really good already. We have Collin, who I found out is from the same town as my family and even graduated from the same high school I did. That's all the students at the moment. As for instructors, there's Jerry, Bill, and Austin. All of them are very good instructors and very friendly people. Jack is the owner (different Jack from above, obviously), but he doesn't teach really any more. According to Jack, we only like him because he's not in the barn.
Well, that's all for this installment. I'll write more as more stuff happens. I'm hoping to get a pair of handmade front shoes passed in the next day or two so I can progress on my forge work. I don't know how tomorrow will go as far as shoeing, but I'm hoping for a good day.
This is me, signing off.
Today wasn't that great of a day. The horse I was supposed to put a shoe on was huge, the size of a small draft horse. And they assigned me a hind foot, which is heavy. I had a lot of problems holding the foot to work on it and the damn horse kept trying to tug the hoof out of my grip. I quicked him with a nail, too. I got so frusterated that the instructors had another student nail the shoe on for me and I finished the clinches. So yeah, not one of my best days...
How does a typical day go, you might ask? Well, I wake up at 6 am so I can make class time at 7 am. For the first two weeks, I was in the beginning class, so I had class every morning. Now that I'm in the advanced class, we're in the forge for an hour instead of class on Tuesday and Thursday. Then we have an hour break for breakfast and dorm cleanup. At 9 am we have to be out in the shoeing barn. We're there for 3 hours, then lunch for an hour at noon, then another 3 hours out in the barn. By the end of class, everyone's tired and sweaty, so typically I go back to the dorm and relax for a bit before taking a shower and doing homework. Yes, there's homework. And tests, too. But that part's been easy for me.
The hard part is the actual shoeing. It's an unnatural posture. I mean, how long can you stand pigeontoed and knock-kneed, crouched at the knees and bent over at the waist? Then, hold a horse's leg either between your knees or in your lap. Mind you, not all horses will stand still while you work on them, so factor in getting tugged and shoved around, too. The forge work isn't too hard. Mostly, it's just about understanding which part of the anvil will have what effect when you hammer a piece of hot steel against it. Part of the curriculum is making a variety of shoes and shoeing tools out of stock. I'm working on that still, but I'm figuring it out pretty well so far. I'm just deliberate in learning, which means I'm a slow worker. I've got another 9 1/2 weeks still, so I cautiously optimistic that I'll pick up everything I need to learn.
On the positive side, everyone here is very nice and helpful. Two of the students, Billy and Marvin, graduate this Saturday. Makayla and Blake were the graduates last week. It's nice to be able to look at the more advanced students and see what I'll be working on in 2 or 3 weeks time. The newer students are making me feel slow, though. Sarah is only on her second week and she's already done 2 feet in a day. Then again, she's only 18 and I'm closing in on 34. And Jack is already making handmade hind shoes, which is the next shoe from where I'm at. He's also in his second week. Isabelle and Tim were the students that started this week. We also have Park, who's a student from Korea. He doesn't speak a lot of English, so conversing with him is interesting at times. But he's a good fellow. There's also Alberto, who's two weeks ahead of me. He's really good already. We have Collin, who I found out is from the same town as my family and even graduated from the same high school I did. That's all the students at the moment. As for instructors, there's Jerry, Bill, and Austin. All of them are very good instructors and very friendly people. Jack is the owner (different Jack from above, obviously), but he doesn't teach really any more. According to Jack, we only like him because he's not in the barn.
Well, that's all for this installment. I'll write more as more stuff happens. I'm hoping to get a pair of handmade front shoes passed in the next day or two so I can progress on my forge work. I don't know how tomorrow will go as far as shoeing, but I'm hoping for a good day.
This is me, signing off.
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