For Want of a Nail...

Did you ever wonder how horseshoes are made? The work is done almost entirely by hand, using heat and steel tools. I have a good friend in Alberta who in his day as a farrier won top prize in the intermediate level of a shoeing competition and, I have no doubt, would have continued this trend upward to first place overall had economic considerations not forced him to seek other lines of work.

While my wife and I were visiting Ross Maxwell and his lovely family in rural Alberta, he demonstrated in his garage the method of turning a straight, single-grooved steel bar into the required slightly asymmetrical, curved, taper-ended marvel, the front and back hoof versions of which are different, as is also necessary. There is a huge amount of theoretical knowledge and practice which goes into a procedure which looks simple only in the hands of a master.

Hammers, tongs and the anvil are the instruments with which one forms the shoe, removing it several times from a furnace (in this case propane-powered) which, roaring away, heats the steel to a glowing orange in minutes. "It takes about ten years to learn how steel moves," says Ross, referring to the shaping processes by which different amounts of heat and hammer-blows affect the directing of parts of the softened metal into their proper places, such as the clips which protrude.

Too hot, and the steel will soften too much, and also will flake off in layers. Too cold, too hard, and it's more and more difficult to hammer into place. So there is a window of temperature range, and one of time, too, as the metal cools quite rapidly once removed from the furnace flames, dulling to red and then back to black. Beat, turn, twirl, always aware that the steel will burn right through your skin and deeper if you touch it, even if it's not glowing!

Every detail of each shoe's form is critical to its function; there is nothing decorative or unnecessary here. The angle of the punched nail holes, for example, is not uniform. All but one of them on each side set of three allow the nails to protrude from the hoof when the nails are hammered in, and the farrier then clips the ends off.

Compared to the slowly growing collection of thin semicircles of rusted iron which I have found and gathered in Svaneti, these are fine protection for the hooves of equus caballus. My stepmother, a champion show-jumper in her youth in Rhodesia, was suitably impressed with them. She tells me that they prevent the hoof from wearing down too fast. Although hooves are made from keratin, the same basic material as hair and fingernails, and is thus nerveless, the living tissue inside it does feel pain, of course.

To remind us of the importance of good shoes, we have this proverb, which has its first versions in the chivalrous European fourteenth century:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1350 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svanetilong trek

Tony Hanmer