Horsewright
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2011
- Messages
- 11,657
Yeah I use to watch Monty Python.
Anyhoo, my son Logan is a working cowboy. He's been pestering us some years now to build him a "Doctoring Bag". A doctoring bag is designed to carry necessary syringes, needles and medicine on the saddle. There are lots of bags on the market however from his standpoint they tend to have one design flaw. Most carry the medicine bottles upside down with the neck sticking out so ya can stick the needle in and withdraw the medicine without having to take the bottle out of the bag. At first glance this seems the way to go. In practicality the rubber stoppers in the bottle wear out and get hard and you can drip out your medicine as you're trotting along looking for the next steer that needs doctoring.
Logan is leaving in a couple of weeks to run a new ranch that his outfit leased in Nevada. Just a little outfit, 5 miles to 10 miles wide and 31 miles long! He's taking 6 horses and figures he's gonna need 7 or 8. So trotting over that kind of sagebrush ya sure don't want to lose all your medicine. Plus some of this stuff is stupid expensive. One of the bottles in the pics cost $1200. So Monday was snowing around here. He wasn't doing too much on the ranch so he called up and asked if we could sit down with him and come up with a doctoring bag. He got here about 11 am and we finished about 8:30 pm.
One of his ideas was for the bottles to carry upright so they didn't drip out. This was trickier than expected. At first we thought of making like a row pocket and sewed a strip down the center of the back plate. Then we we're gonna put the bottles there and sew on the other side of the bottle. That wasn't gonna work so we pulled the stitches. Then we came up with the idea of cutting the bottom corners out of the pouch so it could sew down. Took awhile to get the size right on paper and then we cut the pockets out of water buffalo. Built one up on a piece of scrap first to make sure it was right:
It worked so we did two which is how many he wanted. Here with the backplate:
He wanted to be able to carry two syringes one on each side of the bottles. So, when we sewed on the bottle pouches we continued the stitching, sewing on one side of the loop-for the syringes.
He also requested a flap over the bottles, needle storage and a place to carry a chalk stick, while keeping it all as compact as possible. He also wanted it not to flap around as he was riding. His timing was impeccable as we had three or four different saddles up at the house at the time as Nichole and I had been cleaning them in the evenings. This allowed us to keep trying them on different saddles to make sure our three attachment points worked on all the different saddles. So to attach the doctoring bag those two slots at the top will take the rear saddle strings. There is a ring on the backside at the upper left that other saddle strings can be tied through and then at the bottom a strap that buckles around the rear cinch billet. Here it is all finished and mounted on my saddle:
The syringe tube above the flap carries the chalk stick. Under the flap I built six slots for the extra needles. Took several attempts to get that spacing right.
Everything fits nice and tight which was another design characteristic he wanted. Kind of frustrating but also kind of a fun build. Took the three of us quite a while but we got er done.
So its kinda a finished prototype and we'll probably end up making some changes as he uses it to see how it works. Whadya think?
Anyhoo, my son Logan is a working cowboy. He's been pestering us some years now to build him a "Doctoring Bag". A doctoring bag is designed to carry necessary syringes, needles and medicine on the saddle. There are lots of bags on the market however from his standpoint they tend to have one design flaw. Most carry the medicine bottles upside down with the neck sticking out so ya can stick the needle in and withdraw the medicine without having to take the bottle out of the bag. At first glance this seems the way to go. In practicality the rubber stoppers in the bottle wear out and get hard and you can drip out your medicine as you're trotting along looking for the next steer that needs doctoring.
Logan is leaving in a couple of weeks to run a new ranch that his outfit leased in Nevada. Just a little outfit, 5 miles to 10 miles wide and 31 miles long! He's taking 6 horses and figures he's gonna need 7 or 8. So trotting over that kind of sagebrush ya sure don't want to lose all your medicine. Plus some of this stuff is stupid expensive. One of the bottles in the pics cost $1200. So Monday was snowing around here. He wasn't doing too much on the ranch so he called up and asked if we could sit down with him and come up with a doctoring bag. He got here about 11 am and we finished about 8:30 pm.
One of his ideas was for the bottles to carry upright so they didn't drip out. This was trickier than expected. At first we thought of making like a row pocket and sewed a strip down the center of the back plate. Then we we're gonna put the bottles there and sew on the other side of the bottle. That wasn't gonna work so we pulled the stitches. Then we came up with the idea of cutting the bottom corners out of the pouch so it could sew down. Took awhile to get the size right on paper and then we cut the pockets out of water buffalo. Built one up on a piece of scrap first to make sure it was right:
It worked so we did two which is how many he wanted. Here with the backplate:
He wanted to be able to carry two syringes one on each side of the bottles. So, when we sewed on the bottle pouches we continued the stitching, sewing on one side of the loop-for the syringes.
He also requested a flap over the bottles, needle storage and a place to carry a chalk stick, while keeping it all as compact as possible. He also wanted it not to flap around as he was riding. His timing was impeccable as we had three or four different saddles up at the house at the time as Nichole and I had been cleaning them in the evenings. This allowed us to keep trying them on different saddles to make sure our three attachment points worked on all the different saddles. So to attach the doctoring bag those two slots at the top will take the rear saddle strings. There is a ring on the backside at the upper left that other saddle strings can be tied through and then at the bottom a strap that buckles around the rear cinch billet. Here it is all finished and mounted on my saddle:
The syringe tube above the flap carries the chalk stick. Under the flap I built six slots for the extra needles. Took several attempts to get that spacing right.
Everything fits nice and tight which was another design characteristic he wanted. Kind of frustrating but also kind of a fun build. Took the three of us quite a while but we got er done.
So its kinda a finished prototype and we'll probably end up making some changes as he uses it to see how it works. Whadya think?
