[mitchmaine]

andy,
i know it would only be an educated guess, but would you say from your knowledge of how the d-ring harness works, that it was designed by an engineer, or was it invented by a farmer logger? i know or guess that what we are looking at might be the tenth generation of the original concept and probably quite different, but i have always wondered at the history of that particular harness. it was the only harness around here growing up so it had no name. it was just harness or state prison harness, and the first time i heard it called by name was four ring harness. no one objected to the name but probably cause every one new what we were talking about. the first time i was aware of other harness might have been in an early sfj with illustrations of harness. i remember there was a boston backer, and others but mostly remember that there was no new england harness. that got me asking around the old timers about where did it come from and how long has it been around and the answers were always “it didn’t come from nowhere, its always been from here” that kind of stuff. i did get a set of tugs once in a pile of stuff. tugs and rings only. the tugs were handsewn triple ply and the rings were handforged, but it didn’t mean anything cause people were still blacksmithing at that time. who knows? sure would like to know more about the history of that stuff.

[mitchmaine]

one big difference is that with the scoot you carry the wood, and with the bob you drag it. the scoot is limited to logs 16′-20′ and 20 is pushing it, but with the bobs you can pull tree length pulp and double logs. over in the hills of vermont, coming off the side of a good hill, i think i would like the drag of the wood on the bobsled to keep it stable. over here on the flats, a scoot works great. we used to use a single set of sleds with a long pulp body set on the swing bunk and dragging along behind. you could move a cord and four or five feet on them and they were called a dray or a sloven.

[mitchmaine]

hey tom,
sorry to hear about your upset. hope you are well and mending. there must be a rash of these things going around. i just got off the phone with a logger friend of mine over in western maine. he has suffolks. seems that his feet went out quick from under him and he flipped over the twitch and hit his head on a frozen rock, which sounds harder than a regular one, and blew his hardhat to smitherines. he was complaining about his shoulder and i said pete, you just saved your brains from being scrambled eggs. i was trying to keep it positive. so he’s on pain meds too and trying to mend. but hes like my age and we ain’t so nimble either or quick to heal for that matter. he said you have to swap your hardhat in every 4-5 years, so i thought i’d give mine a look and its stamped 1983, so i’m in the market for a new hardhat. i don’t have a cell phone either but a friend gave me his old trackphone and said if it was charged, it would call 911 even if you didn’t have a plan or whatever. may use that. good idea about a second driver. easier said than done but worth a look for sure. take care and be careful out there. mitch

[mitchmaine]

I have and use both kinds of harness. I think its kind of comparing apples and oranges again. I think the d-ring harness was designed to work in the woods. To hold the pole and tugs taught, up and out of the way so the horse can move free over rough going and stay comfortable doing it. But it adapts to farmwork easily. You can strip the front tugs out (or not) for plow or twitch harness or any job that doesn’t require a pole. Or you can snap in a breast strap for light work. Its great harness. Belly backer harness works well on farm jobs and I like it, but I don’t use it in the woods. It doesn’t seem to hold up well. It would be like cutting wood with sneakers on. You can do it but probably shouldn’t.
When I was looking for harness, people would open their barns and harness closets and dump piles of it on me. Before long they would hear I was looking for harness and bring pickup loads over. I had literally a mountain of harness. Every piece was d-ring. Leather and brass. Mostly made at the state prison. I have to think it was the harness of choice. But maybe there wasn’t a choice, and it was all we made. Who knows? anyway, i’m with ridge and the choice is yours.

[mitchmaine]

Eds question about the yoke and pole got me thinking about harness. The d-ring harness could have been invented for the scoot. I have no way of knowing if it was or wasn’t and it doesn’t really matter. But the two fit together so well. The pole on a scoot isn’t fastened in to the scoot to pull. It has a pin, or bolt or staple in each end that keeps it from sliding back thru the bunk ring or up thru the neck yoke. So its actually held or clamped in compression against the tension provided by the harness. The tighter the tension the better it works. The d-ring harness holds the yoke and eveners together with front and rear tugs joined at the d-ring so that the tension is only on the tugs. The horses are free in the harness to step up into the collar to pull, or step out of the collar and into the brithin to stop or back. It is difficult to “see” this freedom unless you rub your hands down the collar or over their rump to feel. But it is very apparent if you try to snug up your horses in different harness to hold the pole in its compression. In bellybacker, the yoke is snapped into the breast strap and tugs to the evener, naturally. But when you try and shorten up the trace chains, you are drawing up or clamping the horse between its own collar and britchin, and the result is collar,neck, or hip sores. Letting the horses out a little helps their discomfort, but then the rigging goes all to heck. When the horses start the load, the pole falls loose, and the pole clangs around in the yoke ring or the horse snaps her knee on the neckyoke, and when you slow or holdback, the evener lays over the pole and the tug chains drag on the ground. That’s when you realize that the d-ring harness and the wood scoot are brother and sister.
Way back, this husky dealer stopped in my woodyard and lent me a 162 to try for a week. I was using macs. A 60, 81, and a 125. So here’s this orange plastic saw that I was sure was going to break in a day or two, but I used it anyway. It had a hard time keeping up in yard, but chopping wood with it was nice, and I said so. But it wasn’t until I gave it back and went back to the macs that I realized how great that saw really was (when I didn’t have it), and in a month or two I had two of them. Same with the d-ring harness. Youdon’t know what you really have until you are working with something else.

p.s. john morton, if you are listening, happy birthday

[mitchmaine]

@highway 31377 wrote:

The finished product.

https://picasaweb.google.com/107396364480794542661/ScootPictures#5692428252455838498

How long should the pole be? And what do you use to keep the neck yolk from sliding down the pole?

Ed

hey ed, great looking scoot. solid built and i really like the stake pockets.
ever see a t-pin on a pole of an ox scoot? kinda the same. just drive a carriage bolt down through the end of the pole. long enough to catch the ring on your neck yoke. it ought to be 10 1/2 feet or a few inches longer (depending on your heelchains) from that bolt back to where your evener hooks in. another way t6o do it is lay the harness out on the barn floor. hook the youke and evener in where they should be and pull both ways til it stretches out and measure it, pin to pin.
happy new year, bud. mitch

[mitchmaine]

@LongViewFarm 31362 wrote:

One thing that works really slick for supporting horses in any situation is old fire hose. Give yourself a laugh by asking your local fire department where you get find “Old hose.” I’ve found a million ways to use this stuff, but it’s great for lifting/ supporting horses.

more than once, i’ve seen twitch harness, single horse in the woods, just a pair of hames, a jack saddle and a belly band with 6 or 7 feet of 3/8 chain for tugs, passed through old fire hose for chaffing. hardly see it anymore, but if your ever sorting though someones old harness and you see a pair of hames hooked into a pile of chain, most likely thats what you found.

[mitchmaine]

hi sean,
good to meet you. nice team. the old woodsmen might call them chunks.
your photographs never showed the horses “reefed in” to the harness. there are some helpful threads and posts by carl and others about the beautys of your particular harness, including the ability to tighten the rear and short or front tugs between the yoke and evener. tuned to f-sharp was the way the old guys refered to it. back in the archives of equipment to harness should uncover reams of stuff. its always good to update.

glad to have you with us, mitch

[mitchmaine]

brads is right about the discription of the moccasin runner. i beleive it about shape. there was a full and a half moccasin, the full tried to be half round or 1/3 flat on bottom(2,2and 2 out of a six” runner), and the half moccasin was just releived, or 1/2 flat on bottom(1 1/2″, 3″ and 1 1/2″ out of a six” runner). i always have heard the term used i connection with steel shod runners and sleds, but i have been doing it on the wood shoes on our scoot and i think it works good. i laid a beech 4×6 flat on bottom of 4″ thick runners an inch proud inside and out, and cut the moccasin in just because i was worried about the shoe having to much bearing. it has worked good a couple times around on two different scoots, no problems.
if my memory is correct, the whole point of the moccasin runner is to float the runner up on top of the snow more. the bevel seems to hold the runner up a little.

[mitchmaine]

hi mink, i think those fir are running about six to the cord so that tree was probably 700 lb.on not too pliable ground. and i was some glad to be free of it. i love that horse. more each day. we had our spats, but she will churn her guts out for you. she is smart enough to know when shes stuck and gives it a second try and thats it. over. fix it. but if that tree gives as much as a inch she will make a wishbone out of it. you have to take a little care of her to see she don’t get hurt. 16 hands 1600 pounds of thunder and lightning and a touch of snappin’ turtle.

[mitchmaine]

hey ed, i’ll just share yesterday with you.
Typical day in the woods. Everything went wrong. Fuel filter in the yard saw. Trees tipping back. Wedging and pushing them all over. Lost one sideways. Cut it in half and twitched it out, but had to wade through the tops for the afternoon. Down in a corner of the bog. Belle hates it in there. Hates it. You really have to stay on her lines or she’ll turn off at each turn. The female of every species confounds me. I just can’t understand them. She is true to her gender. Totally unpredictable. Very moody. But loyal to a fault and tries wholeheartedly to please. But today she was just mad about being down in that hole. The peat hasn’t frozen yet and she breaks through and you can see her pain. But she was there.
Anyway we were twitching out a goodsize fir, and I stepped on the outside of a good stump to keep it between me and the hitch and I stepped into a hole made from the roots of the stump and the hitch jumped over the stump and pinned my foot in that hole. Belle kept going and I was pinned, and she stripped the lines out of my hands. I hollered whoa and she did. With the lines on the ground and hooked to a hitch, she will stand forever. Forever. Good for me. But I couldn’t quite reach those lines no matter what shape I got into. And I couldn’t find a stout stick anywhere. Belle would have gone if I’d asked but there was 40 more feet of tree to pass over my boot, and she had to make a swing gee before she got too far and the top of that fir would have cleaned my clock for good. I scrunched up my toes and pulled and twisted my foot and nothing would give. No cell phone. Hours till penny would miss me. My foot was starting to hurt now. Had to do something.
So I asked belle to come gee. Her ears twitched and came right around backwards. I had her attention. I asked again, and she pawed a little with her right foot wondering if it was a trick question. I spoke a little firmer and around she came, whoa! So I asked for just a step, just a step, come on just a step, and she leaned into it a bit and it started to lift, but I was already gone. Twenty feet in two steps. Yahoo. Free at last. Love that horse. Sometimes she thinks too much, but yesterday, she did everything right. Man, does this foot hurt today.

[mitchmaine]

hi ed,
i really like your post here. we all know the responsability we take on when we hook an animal and go into the woodlot or out in the fields. thier safety and ours in turn depend on any number of subtle twists and turns in lines, harness eveners and so on. that said, go do it, right? we have to be on our toes and eyes and ears all the time and be in the moment and all the other cliches you can think of. good job reading your horse. i miss alot trying to “git er done”. thanks for the reminder. mitch

[mitchmaine]

happy christmas to you both, and all the dapnet folk. godbless your babies and animals. mitch and penny

[mitchmaine]

didn’t mean you,tom. you made a comment before on not needing the chopper, leaving a man,saw and horse keeping up with a skidder, in small wood, and that seems superhuman to me. nothing personal there, sorry.

[mitchmaine]

Big wood here in maine would be one or two trees to the hitch. No room for the horse there. When the wood starts getting smaller, say 10 – 12” on the stump, and its pulp and firewood, a good chopper working alone with a skidder should be able to cut a truckload a day. Spruce and fir might pose a challenge but its do-able. Hiring a chopper could double the output or at least make a good dent in the second load.so, the chopper pays his own way. But he’s only human and cutting two truckloads comes with its share of troubles like trees setback, or lodged, and so on. So, enter the horse. Here’s where I think the horse earns his keep. If the skidder operator has to stop and run out a full cable through brush and so on, and pull up his hitch, and either limb, or wait for the chopper to finish limbing the lodged trees, etc. it means lost time. If the horse can pull down the lodged tree and bunch the wood away from the cut so the chopper is free to lay down his wood, and the skidder operator can swing around and hook up a full clean hitch, all bunched and limbed, it means an extra couple hitches a day, and the horse is paying his way as well. That’s the way I see it. If we think what I just said is correct, then we have to believe that the whole thing hinges now on the trucker keeping the landing clear. Anyone waiting is going to mess up the works, and the horse is the first to go. Balance is key.
Tom, any man or woman who could cut, limb and bunch a trailer load of spruce and fir in a day, and show up the next morning would win my everlasting admiration. I have the horse and the wood if there are any takers.

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