I always thought that a saddle should last forever, especially if I took good care of it, and religiously cleaned and conditioned it. We recently attended a saddler’s conference where one of the Master Saddlers commented that the life span for a saddle that is in regular use was about 10 years. What happens to the geriatric saddle? Why should it wear out?
Let’s bypass the obvious- Almost anyone can see when leather gets cracked or the billets wear and holes become elongated. Wool flocking that has gotten hard and lumpy can be replaced, but it is the hidden things that can be problematic. Trees can soften and deform with age. Rivets that hold the head plates can shear or loosen. Webbing that supports the seat, or worse yet, that holds the girth billets can rot and fray. Foam within the seats and padded flaps can lose resiliency.
Many riders prefer wooden trees because of the flexibility and feel that they offer. After many miles of absorbing the shock from both the horse and the rider, the tree can lose its elasticity. It can be hard to tell if a tree is broken, or just flaccid. A severely broken tree will be obvious, but it is very possibly for a spring bar to be broken, rivets loose or sheared, and the only way to truly tell if a tree is broken is by dropping the panels and looking. We recently opened up a well-made dressage saddle that had a suspicious click, and we discovered that the wood in the tree was dry rotted. The stirrup bar had pulled loose from one rivet, with a punky chip of wood attached to it. There was no evidence of a wreck or outward damage. We believe that it was just a slow structural failure that fortunately was discovered before the rider was unceremoniously dropped to the ground. It calls to mind the importance of storing your saddle on a rack that allows it to dry- not sitting on top of a soggy saddle pad.
Another condition that befalls all things that age, including us, is the tendency towards general mis-shaping. Riders and horses appreciate soft, comfortable saddles. Most modern saddles are extremely flexible and heavily padded. Unfortunately, the trade off is that soft saddles deform more easily. Horses are not 100% symmetrical….neither are we.. Over time and miles, it is very possible to have panels that become fairly dramatically different in shape. Every time a saddle is adjusted or re-flocked, the leather panels stretch and reform slightly. We saw a quality saddle that came in for consignment a while ago that we sadly had to return to the owner because one panel was almost ¾” longer than the other. The cost of reshaping or replacing the panel would have been prohibitive and probably never restore the saddle to its original shape.
I offer for your consideration a picture of my old saddle. Back in the 1970’s I broke many a young horse in this old friend- long before I knew that mounting from the ground was not good for my saddle. It served me very well until one day I discovered that when I sat in the center of the saddle, that the saddle was no longer centered on my horse. When the saddle was placed with the panels on either side of the spine….I tilted off about 10 degrees to one side. Needless to say, the horses weren’t very happy with this situation either, but it was years before I really understood the mechanics of how this happened.
You may have to think of your older saddle like my very favorite pair of shoes….. They have served me very well, but at this point, it is probably time to retire them!