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I used big galvanized nails on mine cause they don’t pull out. I find that screws tend to snap when I use em on wagons – too much flex, or maybe I just beat on my wagons too much. I built a trailer deck out of pressure treated lumber once. New, green lumber. Oh gosh – so heavy! Had to tighten everything down when it dried. Is that why you went with screws?

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She looks good and stout. Did you attach the deck to the bunk standards?

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Wrinkles on both sides of the horse?

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Watched it with audio this time.

I don’t think the 24″ is too short. It’s possible that it is too narrow. Hard to tell without being there. You could set your hames to shorten that collar a bit and widen it.

The first 26″ is too long. Might be a good width with the pad.

The second 26″ is too long and also too wide.

Foretug angle looks good in the video.

Looks like in the video you’ve got your top hame strap at the middle setting on your hame rachet. If that’s the 26″ collar he’s wearing in that video, those hames might not work with the 24″ collar.

I like the height of the draft. If the shim is under the trace, keep it there.

Sorry, nothing really jumps out at me from the video except that the 26s are too long.

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Video is currently set to private.

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A fleshy horse can lose a couple hundred pounds in water weight during one day of hard work which can easily bump them into the next collar size down. It is not unusual for my easy keeper to drop a collar size during a day of hard work. On the wagon train or during haying, I will bring a collar pad for just such an occasion.

If you’re using a D-ring harness then the tongue probably isn’t wagging the collars. If you’ve been using that 24″ and the horse got the wrinkled patch wearing it, I’m more curious than ever about where your traces come off the hames. Also, your foretug angle. Having the foretug not be 90 degrees to the hames will cause that wrinkled patch. Having your traces shimmed down too low on the hame bolt (I said “roller bolt” in a previous post. I meant hame bolt or trace bolt.) can do it also. Do you have a little spacer on your hame bolt?

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By the way, I really like your horse. Has a real nice look to him.

Collar fit changes quite a bit when the horse is getting into the load. You might even be able to go down to a 23″.

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1.) Salt the horse’s shoulders if you aren’t already. Draw yourself a gallon of warm water in a bucket. Add a palmful of epsom salts and dissolve it. Take a sponge or a rag and sop the shoulders with this saltwater, taking care to backbrush the hair to ensure that the saltwater reaches the skin. Do this at the end of the work day, each day. Next morning, brush the shoulders VERY WELL and/or wash the shoulders with clean water. Even a couple of granules of salt left on the hide will be terribly abrasive under the collar so get all that salt off of there before going to work. Salting the shoulders draws the excess moisture out of the wrinkled area so it doesn’t blister and also toughens the skin.

2.) I had to watch the video without audio; I hope I didn’t miss anything critical. The 24″ collar looks like it fits pretty well in length. The 26″ is way too big, even with the pad. I couldn’t tell much about the width of the 24″ collar from the video. If the collar is too wide and you squish it tighter with the hames, then the collar will get longer and will be too big.

3.) Mowing can be hard on horses if the field has bumps. When one wheel hits a bump, it makes the tongue slap. This causes the collar to rock on the neck. Doesn’t take much of this tongue slap to cause a wrinkley patch like you are finding. A collar that is only a little bit too big will rock pretty easily.

4.) I would be interested in how you set your hames. If you have roller bolt hames, you can likely adjust your draft up or down by a half-inch or so which can make a difference. However, that half-inch is of little consequence if the hames are too big for the collar in the first place. So the collar is only part of the equation.

Can you provide a side shot of the horse hitched and hooked and ready to work? And maybe a closer photo that shows how the hames ride on the collar?

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Reading back through my posts, I see that I called that tertiary rod a “tertiary draft rod” and I shouldn’t have. I was tired. That tertiary rod doesn’t transmit any draft, just keeps the arc of the horse’s travel correct and consistent. It is rigid so the horse can’t come in too far. It is identical in function to a jockey stick.

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In this one the tertiary rod is square and is made of two different diameters of squarestock that telescope into one another. I don’t remember if this rod is adjustable. Seems to me that it would be if a person bothered to design it this way. Probably a set screw or a pin.

In this photo, the rod is lying entirely on top of the tongue and has a leather strap at the end to buckle to the halter. The metal rod jutting up from the vicinity of the leather strap and leaning to the left is not part of the tertiary rod. I don’t know what it’s for. Perhaps to hold the leather strap to keep the rod in place when not in use.

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Oh and because we have not yet said it in so many words – I don’t know if that is the correct tongue for the horsepower. On a horsepower, the evener or singletree needs to be out at the end of the tongue to take advantage of the leverage, not near the base where the hammerstrap is on the tongue you showed us. It’s possible that someone took a wagon tongue and put it on the horsepower. The complex iron pieces at the heel of the tongue are intriguing.

The tertiary rod goes to the horse’s halter to keep him angled the correct direction to walk in a circle. In this photo the rod comes off the tongue near the horsepower and is hooked onto the singletree just for storage. When you go to use the horsepower, you’d unhook the rod from the singletree and attach it to the horse’s halter.

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Yep, stakes. The horsepower needs to be built on a very stout skidding framework. You drag the horsepower to where it needs to be, then stake it to the ground. A series of rods and swage blocks (the blocks also each need to be staked down) transmits the drive out away from the horsepower, outside the radius of the horse’s travel to a piece of machinery. I have some great pictures of a clutch, some different types of speed jacks and some equipment being run by the horsepower. I think a water pump, a corn sheller and a grain grinder. Some things commonly run by a horsepower include thresher, baler, saw. At demonstrations they like to use them to run an ice cream maker.

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Sorry, I guess I was more interested in the fabrication of the base for this one. Didn’t get that tertiary draft rod documented very well. These were all taken at various Small Farmers Journal auctions, by the way. I think most -if not all- of them were rebuilt and consigned by Marvin Brisk. He’d probably be the man to go to if wally b can’t get you set up.

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Slightly different tongue/draft rod setup on this one.

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Closeup of that one.

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