Welcome to our custom saddle tree page.
The saddle trees are custom built one at a time in our tree shop by Terrance McGowan and are completely hand-made. The most common tree styles we offer are:
Great Basin Wade
3-B Visalia
A-fork
Weatherly
Rimrock (swell fork)
Porter 37
Terrance designed and developed the Great Basin Wade. Because of his experience with strings of ranch horses, he designed a wade fork which is a little higher in the gullet to accommodate a greater number of different kinds of horses, while still keeping the horn low and as close as possible to the horse. This tree works well for those who like the wade look, but are having difficulty with the low wade fork. Still achieving the strength of the original wade trees.
Our good friend and teacher Fred Harsant designed the Rimrock.
Forks, bars and cantles are laminated for strength. The common cantle designs are shovel, round, and oval.
Many styles of bronze dally horns or wood post horns are available. Trees are covered with either 5 mm or 6 mm premium hide.
With your custom saddle order, the tree will be built on a bar pattern which fits your needs. Through correspondence together we will decide what your needs are. We offer three bar patterns, all on our uniquely designed bars: shorter bars perfect for cowboy dressage enthusiast, standard, and long (to accommodate longer then 15 inch seat). The bars are offered in semi-quarter horse, quarter horse, and full quarter horse bars or specific measurements. Your tree will be built with the bar, fork and cantle of your choice. The rock and twist will vary depending upon the customer needs.
A frequently asked question is what type of wood we use in our tree, we use the following depending upon availability:
Yellow Popular
Old growth Douglas Fir when available
Engelmann Spruce
Yellow Pine
Marine grade douglas fir or birch plywood is used as the core laminated in both the fork and cantle in every tree.
With all of the work we are doing out of state and out of country, we are working on an easy and reliable method of measuring individual horses to accommodate our methods of saddle tree making.
