Shoes, glorious shoes!

Forgework is finally starting to make sense!  I passed my clips Monday and started in right away on sliderettes.  And the first pair I made were good enough to pass!  So now I'm on to full sliders.  My goal is to get a pair made and passed by the end of Saturday so I can move on to fullered shoes.  I know, I know, what the hell does all that mean?  Well, give me a few to explain.  I even have pictures to help illustrate what the hell I'm talking about.

 This first picture is of a basic hind shoe.  This one passed at the beginning of last week, which is when I started working on clips.  I must have knocked out three dozen clips or so before I felt good about them.  The other problem was that I first was using a borrowed clip starter and all my clips were turning out too wide.  So I spent $36 and bought a new hammer, a cross pein hammer.  It has a normal head on one side and a thin, wedged head on the other.  I've been told it can be used for shoe welding too, which was one of the selling points.  But more on clips in a minute.

This second picture is a comparison of a basic front shoe versus a basic hind shoe.  The front shoe is the round one on the left, the hind shoe is the more triangular one on the right.  You see, a horse's front feet are a different shape than the back feet.  These shoes would fit a perfect shaped foot.  Of which there is none, of course.  What happens in the real world is that you start with a basic keg shoe and shape it to the foot you're shoeing.  Some few shoes come preshaped to either a front or hind shape, but a keg shoe is a keg shoe and they only come in one shape.  We have to know the basic shapes so that we can form the shoes to at least a close approximation of the foot before final shaping to the actual foot.

Now, back to those blasted clips.  I know I've described them before, but this photo is angled to show them to their best advantage.  The top two shoes are fronts with toe clips, the bottom two are hind shoes with quarter clips.  Toe and quarter refers to the part of the hoof the clip is touching.  The toe is the front of the foot, the quarters are the sides, and the heels are toward the back.  These are the full set of shoes that passed.  Hell of a lot of work, let me assure you!  And then you burn them on to the bottom of the foot.  The clips are burned to the sides of the foot, too, so that they sit flush with the outside of the hoof wall. 

 Once those were knocked out and passed Monday, I started in on these babies.  These are sliderettes.  An astute observer would notice that they're kind of similar to hind shoes in shape and you'd be right.  That's because sliderettes and their bigger cousins, sliders, are only put on hind feet.  They're used in western style riding, during reining comeptitions.  You know those sliding stops you see so much in competitions?  These shoes are specifically designed to help with those.  Sliders are big flat shoes that extend past the heels of the hind feet.  The flat surface allows the horse to slide farther, while the trailers on the heels dig into the ground to keep the horse's feet from going out from under them completely and protect the back of the horse's leg just above the foot from dragging on the ground.  The only difference between sliderettes and sliders is a quarter of an inch of width.  Sliders are fatter than sliderettes.

This photo is a comparison between a basic hind shoe and a sliderette.  Notice how much longer the heels are and how they turn back out compared to the heels on the basic hind shoe.  The piece of metal you start with is only an inch longer for the sliderette than for the hind shoe and the nail holes are placed in the same spots for each shoe.  Oh, and in case it wasn't clear, the extra metal on each heel is called a trailer.  Other shoes can have trailers as well, for a variety of purposes, sometimes even on only one side and not the other.  Trailers grab the heels as they hit the ground and direct the motion of the foot, so another reason to have trailers on the sliderettes is to direct the foot into a straight line as they both drag equally.  Yes, this means that a trailer on only one heel would direct the foot to turn in that direction.  We're learning a lot tonight, aren't we?

Anyway, now that I've filled everyone's heads with more information than they probably wanted to know about shoes, I guess I better wrap this up.  It's almost bedtime and sleep is important to me being able to work in the barn tomorrow.  Today was a good day and I'm hoping tomorrow goes well, too.

This is me, signing off.