CUSTOM WESTERN SADDLES
Here at Bryan McVicar Custom saddle's we look forward to walking you through the process of choosing your saddle, fitting it and choosing your customising. It is essential to us that we do this in a friendly and accommodating manner, with lots of communication.
Why choose a custom Western Saddle
A Custom made saddle from Bryan McVicar has the following advantages. Firstly it will be fitted to your horse. It is also fitted to you with seat size, seat style and stirrup length taken into account.
Next you get to choose custom options. All saddles come with border stamping as standard, you can chose to have more stamping added with ½ , ¾ or fully stamped on your saddle.
Things like a crupper dee. Extras dee’s added to the conchos where the tie strings are located, horn wrap , rope strap. Stirrups- size and style.
You can also accessorise your saddle with matching breastplate, bridle and crupper.
Plus let’s not forget you have a choice of saddle tree types. Wade, slick fork, medium swells, plus cantle height and style.
Colour- Dark brown or natural Tan
Base saddle (what you get before we start customising)
Front and back cinch, stirrups,6 sets of strings (long and practical)
Jeramiah Watts fittings -conchos and rigging dees.
Rawhide covered tree, suited to you and your horse.
Border stamping.
Stirrups
Fitting –
It is important to choose a tree size that will fit your horse- A personal fitting is the best option with Bryan Physically doing a saddle fitting session with your horse/ horses. If this is impossible you can make a template of your horses back and supply photos to help Bryan choose a tree shape. Next we decide what size seat is best going to fit you the rider.
Communication-
We appreciate that the process described above can be quite overwhelming- to this end Bryan will arrange a phone call or meeting to discuss all the options .
Time frame- this is dictated by the amount of time it takes to get a tree made plus the number of saddle orders ahead of yours , Count on a 6 months wait time plus or minus .
The Saddle Tree-
This is the base of the saddle is Like the foundation of a house. Our custom saddles are built on trees made either by Miro Parsonson ( Warren wright trained tree maker) or Mulga trees from Queensland . Be aware tree makers will not change their tree shape to fit the extreme back shapes of some horses. Although you may be ordering a custom saddle to fit that special horse of yours with an odd back shape , The saddle built for you and your horse will eventually out last your horse and possibly yourself and end up being put on between 50 and 500 horses in the lifetime of the saddle. For this reason tree makers stick to their basic bar shape and will only alter the width and length of their Bars .(the bars are the two wooden pieces that run down either side of the tree and fit against the horses back)
Customizing a tree-
as a saddle maker there are things we can do to help your saddle fit your horse . We can supply a saddlepad with pockets and shims to customize the saddle to the horse. Or in extreme cases we can shim the bars with leather to make the saddle fit your horse. If we do this we need a written endemnity from the owner of the saddle stating that once the saddle is no longer used on the horse it was customized for , the custom shims will be removed. ( a simple process involving removing the skirts