07/20/2025
Now this is sad ! Client brings in a saddle ( very nice looking, however no makers mark ) for clean/nourishing, new fleece, redo horn and new hornwrap,new strings, new hobble straps and new natural fleece. Pretty much a full rebuild with the exception of new stirrup leathers. So, we take the saddle apart and find that it is probably an older Mexican import saddle, ( he bought it in the early 1990’s ) and lo and behold it has presses paper / cardboard skirts with patchwork upper layer leather parts on the topside. In other words “ basically trash skirts ) and a funny partially rawhide covered wood tree. So no, we are not going to rebuild the saddle, a task more expensive than the value of the saddle. The saddle has excellent tooling and held together because of the number of screws and nails and probably a hundred staples. We have been getting quite a few of these imported Pakistanamd made in India paper /cardboard saddles and we are pretty upfront and honest with people anout them and we try to help educate them to not buy plastic trees and artificial fleece as those are the first two major cost cutting options on junk saddles ) Here are the pictures.
