Horseshoeing for the Rank Beginner
(Page 4 of 6)
September/October 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
If you have properly prepared the hoof, such that the distance from the outside of the wall to the white line is equal to the distance from the edge of the shoe to the crease, you may fit the edge of the shoe to the wall. But remember that the basic goal is to make the nail holes correspond to the outside of the white line. Turn the heels in slightly to cover the bearing surface of the heel of the hoof, but not to the extent that it affects the freedom of the frog. Level the shoe, and the job is done. If you have the same experience I had while learning, you will find that one shoe will shape right up, while the next one (almost identical to the first) will take an hour of mashing and cussing. But after a while, you will standardize your operations, and this will become less of a problem.
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Next you should open up the nail holes with a pritchel. Often bits of metal are left in the holes during manufacture, or you might have partially closed some holes while shaping. Moreover, you will normally want to use the largest nails possible, and a little pritchel work might allow the use of a size larger. And as we will see below, you need the full opening of the nail hole to work with in order to properly set the shoe.
Select the size nail with the largest shank that the nail holes will accept. If the head slips plumb down into the crease without any hammering, the shoe will twist and shear the nail heads in short order. As a rough guide, I generally find myself using No. 5 city heads on 00 and 0 shoes, and No. 5 regular heads on 1 and 2 shoes, but this will vary with the make of shoes, the amount of pritchel work you do, etc.
Now you are ready to nail the shoe to the hoof. As mentioned before, this involves quite a juggling act, complicated by the fact that you're hanging onto the business end of a halfton beast. However, most farriers find that this process becomes routine with practice, and that the difficult decisions and craftsmanship are really in shaping the hoof and fitting the shoe.
For some unknown reason, if you just set the shoe on the foot in the desired position and nail into the center of each of the nail holes, the shoe will invariably wind up setting one-eighth to one-quarter of an inch back from where you intended. This means you either must pull and reset, or dub off the toe. To avoid this, I use the following method: Place the shoe on the foot, with the toe centered and flush with the wall. Check the heels and make sure they are equidistant from the frog and cover the heels of the hoof. Then press your first nail (flat side out, of course) into the outside front corner of the second nail hole from the toe on one side of the shoe. (Figure 7). Drive the point in with a couple of licks of the hammer. This should be no deeper than necessary to avoid pulling the nail out in the next operation. Check the position of the shoe again, and (keeping your first nail in the same location in its nail hole), start a second nail in the same location on the opposite side of the shoe. After this nail is deep enough to also be firm, check the position of the shoe again. If it is correct, continue driving these two nails, first a few licks on one, then a few on the other, until both are fully driven.
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