Custom Stirrup Hobbles - Pat Puckett Inspired Guards

Learning more about leatherwork is a natural result when you get into horsemanship and horse tack.

The ability to fix your tack or even make some items can prove valuable (and even get you out of a pinch at times).

Pat Puckett Stirrup Hobbles

Pat Puckett is a gem and a staple in the horsemanship world. What is great about Pat is that he learns from experience. Everything he teaches, he has used on a ranch.

You can either learn from your own mistakes or the mistakes of others.

So, you listen when Pat shares a recommendation he learned after finding himself in a bad situation.

In one video, he was going over his saddle setup. Pat sells his own saddle design (which was the primary purpose of the video); but, during that video, he mentioned an interesting custom change that he made to his stirrups.

He attached a piece of leather to the side of his stirrup and connected it to the stirrup hobble.

Stirrup Hobble Adjustment For Safety

If you look at your standard saddle setup, where the stirrup meets the fender, there is a small gap. It doesn't seem like much, but according to Pat, one time, he had a rope slide into that gap and got stuck.

The result?

A rodeo he didn't plan on.

So, following that event, he retrofitted his setup with a piece of leather from the stirrup to the hobble.

Thus making it impossible for a rope to get caught like that again.

DIY Stirrup Hobble Guard

Will you or I ever find ourselves in a similar situation where a rope gets caught?

Hopefully not.

However, if you know it is possible, why would you not take action to avoid it?

I know nothing about sewing leather or leatherwork. So, I re-watched Pat's video (to think up a design), went down the YouTube leatherworking rabbit hole, and bought myself some basic leatherworking items to put together version 1.0 of my Stirrup Hobble Guard.

Here are the items I used to get started:

• Leather Working Tool Set for Beginners

• Leather Edge Beveler + Cutting Knife Set

• Snap Fastener Kit

• Tokonole Leather Finish Burnishing Gum

• CA Glue with Activator

• Cutting Mat

How Is This Hobble Guard Different From Pat Puckett's?

​In Pat's design, he permanently secured a vertical piece of leather to the stirrup's side, then laced the stirrup hobble through the top. The hobble and leather guard go wherever that set of stirrups goes.

That might work for him because he may change his stirrups infrequently.

In my situation, we change between a couple of different stirrups regularly. So, I wanted to develop a design that could stay with the saddle and not with the stirrup.

Here is what I thought up.

The stirrup hobble fishes through a loop at the top of the leather guard (similar to Pat's), but the bottom is the main change. So instead of securing it permanently to the stirrup, I added a leather loop that wraps around it and snaps. This way, you can unsnap that guard and hobble, undo the fender, change your stirrup, and put it together again. 

The Stirrup Hobble Guard can stay with the saddle.

What's Next?

This is version 1.0 of the guard. The plan is to use it, find flaws, design adjustments, and make a 2.0 version at some point.

I will purchase better-quality leather (instead of the strap leather) to make the new one.

The goal is to get this hobble, and all of our stirrup setups, dialed in.

The primary motivation for this different design is to be able to use it when we change over to the TrailMax Overshoe stirrups that become a necessity with particular boots and when we go hunting.

(I am also working on a TrailMax Overshoe Stirrup leather tread I am excited to learn to make.)