Transylvanian horseman

Convenient equestrian home

A few weeks ago, Victoria mentioned how nice it would be to have her horses under the same roof as her. It is a nice idea. I'm not sure whether she was thinking about a home quite like this one, however it is convenient for the owner.

The owner lives on the left, and probably has two rooms, heated by a wood-burning stove. In the centre is a barn, used to store a cart and tack, and also giving access to the roof space where hay is stored. Firewood may be kept in the centre too. On the right is the stable for horses, cows, pigs and chickens. There is an inside access between all the spaces, so the owner does not have to go out in bad weather. Often there is an outhouse in the central barn, used at least in the winter. One at the end of the garden smells less in summer. Timber construction throughout is ecological, though one has to take care to burn only seasoned wood on the stove. Turnout for the livestock starts at the door. The view is nice too.

This house is a few miles south of here. The woods at the top of the hill behind contain the foundations of a fortress, allegedly built by Vlad Dracula.

Lifesaving winter item

At last, the hot tub in the house has been connected and put into working order. As well as being a nice addition for visitors, it will help keep Danielle and I relaxed and happy through the cold winter months. I am pleased to report that it is just as warm and cozy as this steamy photo suggests.

The construction firm that worked on the house last winter managed to install a hot tub without a heater (making it a decidedly cold tub!) Finally, a new and handy neighbour, Samuel Smith, has succeeded in adding the missing heater, filter and associated wiring. Samuel is from the US, where he built houses, and now lives not far away with his Romanian wife.

So it looks as if the winter ahead will be quite pleasant after all.

A useful gadget

Introducing my favourite yard gadget, the magnetic nail sweeper.

We shoe several horses each week in the forge here at the riding centre. That makes for dozens of removed old nails, and dozens too of the little sharp nail tips that the farrier makes when he twists off the end of each driven nail. Each could cause a puncture to either our car or our truck. Even though I parked both vehicles on the opposite side of the yard to the forge, there used to be a steady and annoying stream of punctures.

This handy and inexpensive (50 euro / $75 aproximately) gadget is swept across the area where a horse has been shod, after each shoeing, where it picks up a whole collection of sharp little pieces of steel. A minute's methodical work may save a puncture, or several.

There is an audible click each time the sweeper picks up a metal shard, which smacks into the alumnium lower casing at quite a speed. It clicks a lot after a horse has been shod.

I do like this gadget. Simple, effective, and a great time-saver. Every place that shoes horses will, very likely, find one useful.

No, I don't sell magnetic sweepers. But I do like them.

Another week has started

A weekend has shot past. Supposedly a time to rest from the week's labours, weekends seem to pass in a flash. Diane is taking this week's ride out, leaving me to get on with a variety of work here. I've started by welding borium on horseshoes, and moved onto fixing a leak in a bathroom. Danielle is busy with paperwork as usual, of course.

 

On a trip to Bistrita, I snapped a photo of an old horse-drawn vehicle that has appeared outside Ilva Mica town hall, just down the valley from here. At first I thought that it might be a fire engine, however it looks more like a mail car. I wonder just how many old vehicles there are sitting in barns out there? I have an old horse-drawn fire engine in my barn, awaiting restoration, amazingly only withdrawn from fire brigade service around the year 2002. It must have been amongst the last horse-drawn fire engines in service in the Western world.

On Sunday we were out with our big old mare, Kaluga, and the new harness. I'm pleased with the padded saddle that spreads out the weight of the harness and shafts over her back. Most harnesses out here have a plain wide back strap, which can rub the spine if the horse doesn't have a naturally rounded profile. The padded sections are filled with wool, like saddle stuffing.

The horses received their periodic veterinary checkup on Saturday. As usual, several of the older horses needed teeth rasping. We also found a couple of cases of peritonitis, a swelling of the roof of the mouth, which is believed to result from the horses eating pine boughs in the forest. Presumably spines occasionally prick the inside of the mouth, through which infection starts. Since pine forest is so widespread, it is difficult to eliminate this problem, so we are treating each case with a course of injections.

Pintea, the white gelding who seems to have strong allergic reactions to various influences, had a bad reaction to an insect bite. The bite had scabbed over, however we found that the skin below the scab had necrosis. Basically, a piece of skin the size of a coin had turned to leather. This is a new and unusual problem, which I put down to more aggressive insect species appearing after a cool winter followed by a long, hot summer. The vet easily removed the dead skin under local anaesthesia, and Pintea has a sterile dressing in place whilst the wound heals. I've applied wound healing gel and changed the dressing daily, taping the dressing in place. It is quite difficult to get the tape to adhere, even special medical tape from the pharmacy. Fortunately Pintea is good and doesn't try and remove the dressing with his teeth (I am sure that he can reach his back) or rolling. He's in the stable now where it is cooler and there are fewer flies.

Finally, I've been thinking about the problems caused by lost shoes. The horses are doing more miles than in previous years, and shoes are getting lost from time to time. The biggest cause seems to be overreaching, and I have spoken to my farrier to take care not to set shoes too far back. Precise attention to detail is not a Romanian strength, and I do have to watch my farrier carefully. I've decided to acquire some Easyboots, one in each size, to tie to the saddles so that I always have one to replace any lost shoe for the rest of that day's ride. We can always nail a shoe back on, or replace it if lost, at an overnight stop. However the horse may have to go for several hours over stony ground to reach the end of the day's ride. I've been advised to buy the Easyboot Epic with gaiters - has anyone any comments?

New carriages

Last autumn I ordered four carriages from the Eurocar factory in Western Romania. The idea was that I would begin to offer carriage driving holidays as well as riding trips. Today the carriages arrived. A timber truck brought them as a backload, having made a delivery near to the carriage factory. There are three small carriages for two people each, and one wagonette for up to six.

All are configured for a single horse, however the wagonette also has a pole that can be fitted for traction by two horses. I decided to use pneumatic tyres because some of the routes planned use forest tracks that can be muddy at times, and other sections use stony tracks that quickly destroy the solid rubber tyres fitted to spoked wheels. They all have spring suspension and folding hoods for comfort. Each carriage has brakes too, to ease the load on the horse on long downhill stretches.

The next step is to take a series of publicity photos, tomorrow morning in fact. Then one of the carriages needs to make the planned five-day circuit to verify its performance. We've already completed the circuit using a farm cart and our two-wheel training carriage.

All told, this points to an exciting new development for our business here. There are few places where vistors can drive a carriage in a horse society, staying in traditional villages and seeing the locals working their draught horses. I'm looking forward to starting to operate these carriage tours.

Saddle modification

As the guide, I end up carrying several kilos of baggage whenever I lead a ride. I have human and first aid kits, tools to tighten or remove a loose shoe, a very useful Leatherman tool and a sharp pocket knife, as well as my drinking water, lunch and waterproof clothes. I had been using a pair of saddlebags that sat over my horse's neck just in front of my saddle. However, they have been getting heaver as gear got added. So I decided to make a carrying plate for my new saddle, to hold a pair of saddlebags behind me, raised off my horse's back so as to avoid rubs.

I began by cutting out a piece of 2mm steel plate, heating it to red heat in my gas forge, and hammering it over an anvil to create a curved profile that matched the cantle of my saddle. Then I cut out two strips of 2mm steel to attach the plate to the cantle, welding them to the saddle and drilling two screw holes per plate. Heating the plate in my forge again, I bent and twisted each plate in turn to fit snugly against the cantle when holding the plate horizontally. After cooling it in a bucket of water, I verified that it fitted well, and made a few final minor adjustments with hammer, anvil and vice. The carrying plate being complete, I removed corrosion using a grinding wheel and wire brush, and removed edge burrs using a file.

After painting the carrying plate, I fitted a leather covering, made from a piece of the breastcollar of a discarded old harness. I screwed the carrying plate to the wooden tree at the cantle of my saddle. (Thank goodness that good saddle makers still use wooden trees. My saddle is a Keith Bryan Pathfinder, one of the best endurance saddles: strong, well-made, and confortable for both horse and rider.) Finally, I sewed the leather around the metal plate, trimmed the edges of the old harness leather to look as neat as possible (being old and well-used, it no longer had completely straight edges), and oiled the leather.

The next step is to make a new pair of saddlebags, or adapt an old pair. To fit the modified saddle, the saddlebags will need a main strap that sits across the carrying plate, and a balancing strap that sits across the rear of the seat. That's the next project.

Sequel to the tip-cart saga

Today we finally made the modifications that I alluded to in my previous post on the subject. We moved the hitch point to a spot immediately behind the axle, making for a better balanced vehicle with less bounce to its ride. Formerly, the hitch point had been located further back, expediently attached to an old equipment mount. However it worked as well as one might expect of a compromise, so I bit the bullet and grabbed the angle grinder.

The resulting vehicle is a very useful and efficient way for one horse and one person to transport and dump up to a cubic metre of manure or stable bedding, and up to a tonne of materials such as soil or crushed stone. It would even be possible, by adding a fixed pole, to make this into a two-horse vehicle. We need the greater maneuvrability of a single horse vehicle to work around our stalls, however two horses would allow heavier loads to be hauled, or steeper hills to be negotiated.

Vasile gave the modified tip-cart his vote of success. It's reassuring when the future user likes the tool that he has been given.

Tip-cart details

A few posts ago I mentioned that the workings of my new tip-cart are better explained by photos. So I decided to post some photos. It's Sunday afternoon, and I have a bit of time.

The tip-cart is going to look better in the Spring when it will get painted again. At the moment, it has that rusty "farm machinery" look. The brown paint is red oxide anti-rust paint. We get through a fair amount of that on our various carts each Spring.

Like a lot of the farm carts around here, it's a bit of a "loose fit" vehicle. That makes it very flexible for traversing rough ground. It is also built from two other vehicles, a forecart and a tip cart that used to have shafts. One can still see the strange hitch on the forecart (at one point it had machinery mounted behind) and the cut-off shafts under the tipping body.

The pictures also show the central shaft that links front and rear sections. In Romanian farm vehicle nomenclature, this is called inima, which translates as heart. I'd probably call it spine. The hitchcart is slightly heavier at the front, as per farm cart practice, so the crossbar projecting backwards supports the hitchcart at a suitable angle using the inima. The crossbar has a wooden bearing surface, which wears away over time and is replaced when necessary. There is an extra crossbar, to stop the hitchcart tipping upward on rough ground or uphill slopes (or if a heavy horseman sits on the seat).

Useful gadgets

I live and work in a place where, at the time of writing, it is cheaper to employ people than to mechanize. Plus, interest rates are high (and I have borrowed more than enough to modernize the riding centre). However, there is still a place for useful gadgets that help my staff to work more efficiently. If a horse can pull the gadget, all the better.

Moving muck is everyone’s least favourite job, and moving sawdust bedding is one of the awkwardest. To begin with, we built a tip-cart for one horse to pull. It began with a timber body, but that rotted, so we built a steel body. Luckily, that was before the Chinese started to buy so much steel that prices rocketed. However, the tip cart started to be used for hauling soil and rock during our building project, and I decided that the weight transferred by the shafts onto the horse’s back was excessive with such a load. Plus, shoveling muck in from the back tended to result in weight accumulating at the front, where the horse carried it via the shafts.

Fortunately, we had an old two-wheeled forecart lying in the barn. It was soon modified to pull the tip-cart, which we converted into a trailer. The whole unit was patterned on the typical Transylvanian farm cart, which has a central tubular steel spine. This spine not only holds the front and rear sections in formation, it also stops the front section tipping up. (Just how is easier to understand from photos. I'll try to post some.)

So now we have a tip-cart that is easy on the horse, has a convenient working platform for the horseman, and still carries a cubic metre of material. It’s great for mucking out the stalls (which we can drive into), and for collecting sawdust bedding (which the local sawmills in the village give away for free). It tips up easily, making unloading simple and quick. One big horse pulls the cart. It’s so much quieter and cheaper than a tractor. It employs someone, and it’s environmentally sound. It’s perfect for a riding centre.