Category Archives: Our Products
We can fit any horse – here’s proof!
Because our tack is made to order we’re often asked to take on tough-to-fit horses or tough-to-fit breeds. We were happy to be contacted by someone trying to fit a European Barbant. Never heard of the European Barbant?
The European Barbant comes from the Barbant province in Belgium and according to the European Barbant Registry of America is “considered the mother breed of almost all other heavy cold-blooded breeds around the world.” The Barbant is typically 16.2-17 hh at the withers with a heavy build and is often (but not always) a roany color. They have feathers around their lower legs and have short, thick limbs and a 45-degree shoulder slope.
Due to its size and heft, the European Barbant can be used for a variety of tasks, from farm and carriage work to forestry to combined driving and even dressage.
The European Barbant is a type of draft horse, so they have wide faces and often a straight or convex facial profile, but they’re not as large-framed as a full-blood Clydesdale or Shire. That can mean they’re a challenging fit, so we were happy to adapt a few pieces to fit these gorgeous models.
Have a horse who’s tough to fit? We can help! Drop our customer service team a line (and photos of the horse/pony/mule/donkey in question at 2horsetack at gmail dot com.
Another padding update
A few months ago, we made this post to help you sort out the difference between our neoprene and our leather padding, which we’ve added as options to most of our halter, bridle, and breastcollar designs. (You can reread that piece here.)
Now, we’ve got two more types of padding in our shop! Each has its own particular attributes to suit your needs.
The softest padding we offer is deerskin. There’s really no way to tell from pictures how buttery this is to the touch, but believe us when we say that if you choose this padding you’ll wish we made deerskin-padded boots and gloves for you. Deerskin padding is available in nine different colors and the dyes end up looking especially vibrant with this material.
Right now, deerskin is only available on our turnout halters, but it’ll be coming to all our designs soon.
The other new padding is our synthetic padding. This is a closed-cell, sweatproof padding covered by a waterproof, colored vinyl. The vinyl is marine vinyl, which means it’s especially tough and resistant to fading. This combination of materials is popular with certain types of harness makers because it can hold up to so well to a sweaty horse on a long drive.
This padding comes in 17 colors to go with our already-extensive list of beta biothane base colors.
Whichever type of padding you choose, your horse will thank you!
Make any bridle bitless!
Our bitless bridles are, without doubt, some of the the most popular products we offer in our shop. Some folks love collecting different styles of bridles to use on their horses (and we’re happy to help them do that!) but for those who haven’t tried bitless bridles on their horses before, it can be intimidating. Who wants to buy a whole new headstall just to test out whether or not their horse will take to the style?
Lots of horses really love going bitless, but it’s not the best solution for everybody and you really never know until you try.
That’s why we offer several hackamore noseband pieces that you can use with your current bridle to test out the bitless life before committing.
We just introduced this padded hackamore noseband for people who want to add their own metal hackamore to an existing bridle. This customer from Instagram shows us how this piece is attached over the bridge of the nose to keep the hackamore attachment steady from side to side:
(This horse is modeling our Traditional Halter Bridle with their own hackamore and black padded noseband. You can order a halter bridle like this here.)
You can also fasten the bit ends of the cheekpieces on your existing bridle to one of our two bitless nosebands.
This is our sidepull bitless noseband, which will apply pressure much like a sidepull bridle.
And this is our Western bitless hackamore. It applies pressure in a similar distribution across the nose, however the Western bitless has two rings under the chin, which allow a rider neck reining or riding one-handed more precise application of pressure to one side of the jaw at a time.
There’s really no wrong answer to the type of bitless bridle or noseband you choose. And with prices as low as $25 for the padded noseband for hackamores, you don’t have much to lose!
Adding holes to your beta tack
We sometimes get questions from customers about how to add holes to beta biothane halters or bridles that are just a little bit loose. We work really hard to offer a range of sizes from mini horse to draft horse with everything in between, so hopefully your gear will fit your horse perfectly. Sometimes though, it needs a slight adjustment on one strap to work for an individual head shape, without the need to size the whole piece down.
With a leather item, you can just pull out your leather hole punch and add what you need. Well, the same applies to beta! A leather whole punch will work on beta too.
Similarly, our friend Pecan recently reminded us that leatherworking tools can also be used to add nameplates to beta biothane pieces. We don’t sell nameplates at Two Horse Tack as of this writing, but one can easily be added if you pick one up from another shop.
Show us your gear in action! Post pics of your horse or pony modeling at our Facebook page.
Sorting out our beta biothane options
Most of what we sell in our shop is tack made from beta biothane, but recently we’ve added a new type of beta. If you’re trying to decide which type is best for you, we may be able to help.
Our Standard Beta Biothane is one generation removed from biothane, which you may be familiar with as one of the original synthetic materials that became popular for horse tack years ago. Biothane, which we use only for color overlays, often has a shiny finish to it and can sometimes be a bit stiffer than leather.
Beta biothane, which is the primary material we carry, is a coated nylon material. It has more of a matte finish to its color and is soft and pliable. People like this material because of the wide variety of colors and shades it comes in. It’s waterproof and fadeproof, which makes it much easier to care for than conventional leather.
There are a variety of different types of biothane and beta biothane material. For industrial purposes, many of their names include a number that indicate different varieties. We’ve recently begun offering products made from 580 beta biothane, which we’re calling Better Than Leather. We think this subtype of beta biothane is even closer to having the feel and flexibility of leather.
Those of us familiar with both materials generally find Better Than Leather to be more akin to freshly-oiled, high quality leather — the surface of the material has a soft sheen to it and it’s slightly softer and more pliable in terms of its flexibility. We offer all our halter, bridle, and breastcollar designs in Better Than Leather as well as our usual beta biothane. Better Than Leather is available only in brown and black, and is a great choice for someone who wants a traditional look with the perks of an unconventional material.
Choose from two types of padding!
We’ve had customers ask us for years to add padding to our products. While beta biothane is pretty smooth and gentle on most horses’ skin, some people prefer another soft layer on the insides of their halters and bridles, and we totally get that.
We now offer not one but two forms of padding on all our basic halter, bridle, and breastcollar designs — neoprene and leather.
Neoprene padding is a synthetic, waterproof material with a softer texture than our conventional beta biothane (though it’s fairy comparable to our 580 beta in terms of smoothness). This is available on any design, on the product’s regular page, for around a $10 upcharge. Black neoprene is the only color we have available for this right now. As you can see with the turquoise turnout halter above, this can be a great contrast to a bright beta, especially if you also choose black stitching.
Leather padding is the option you see above, with our beta biothane turnout halter. Our leather padded items have their own product pages because we offer several colors of leather padding, and it’s difficult to show too many different option combinations on a single product page. The leather we’ve used for padding is not the usual thick, sometimes-stiff leather that you’d use for a standard leather turnout — it’s much more soft and flexible, and has a light sheen to it, giving the colors a metallic appearance.
We offer leather padding options in blue, pink, red, purple, silver, and turquoise. As you can see from the photo above, when the item is on the horse, this produces just a thin outline of dramatic color around the edges of the halter or bridle, which means it’s great to pair with a traditional black or brown, but could also work as an accent color to a bright beta biothane.
Of course, leather is going to be less resistant to a dunk in a water bucket at the end of the day than neoprene or beta biothane, but this leather is soft enough that it’s not going to dry out and crack quickly and should hold up just fine to regular use. It will perform best if you wipe it down with a sponge and simple leather soap.
In the end, there’s really no wrong answer between the two padding options — just comes down to what qualities are most important to you and your horse!
Shop our line of leather padded items here and add neoprene to any of your favorite products on the product page. Don’t see the option to add neoprene padding? Send us a note at 2horsetack at g mail
Please note: We cannot add padding to items that already have an overlay option, like reflective or two-color items. This makes them too thick to use in a practical way.
We’ve made our sidepulls even better!
One of our most enduring bestsellers through the years has been our sidepull. No matter if it comes in our traditional beta biothane, in our Almost Leather beta, nylon, or leather, that’s the design that attracts people across lots of disciplines and breeds.
One thing we’ve noticed through the years is that you can have a lot of different horse head shapes within the same size. For example, our standard Horse Size will fit a Quarter Horse, a Tennessee Walker, and a Morgan, but between and within those breeds you could be looking at relatively different proportions for brow width, face length, and nose width. (That’s just one of the reasons we leave a box to fill in horse’s height, approximate weight, and breed at checkout — so our tackmakers can estimate what your horse’s head shape is most likely to be.)
Generally, this isn’t a problem and as long as the appropriate size is chosen for the horse, our more conventional English or Western bridles will work just fine.
We did notice that in some cases though, the sidepull might fail to sit quite “right” on a horse’s head. Part of the difficulty is that third strap between the traditional noseband and throatlatch — horses’ skulls can be fairly different widths between the jawbones there — but it was also the width of the brow in proportion to the cheek lengths. This could sometimes cause poorly-fitting sidepulls to sit with the cheekpieces sitting too close to the horse’s eye.
This was as frustrating to us as it was to you, and we’re happy to announce we’ve workshopped this with some of our best tackmakers and found a solution. By making small adjustments to the standard strap lengths and proportions within each size (mini to draft available), we were able to correct the angle of the noseband, which keeps those side straps where they should be. These slight changes seem to have made this headstall work better for all our customers. The horses who were already comfortable in our sidepulls should still achieve the perfect fit.
Right now, our sidepulls start at just $20 for nylon and $48 for beta biothane, so what are you waiting for? Pick one up today.
We’ll help you get a grip…on your reins.
“Without question, the super grip is my favorite part of these reins. With and without gloves in dry and wet conditions, it lives up to it’s namesake and provides superior grip. When you’ve got a horse like Q who tends to lean into the bridle and go heavily on the forehand as her first and most favorite evasion, having a secure grip is critical!”
Everyone loves our super grip reins — the perfect mix of color and safety.
Liz Stout at the In Omnia Paratus blog recently reviewed our reins with super grip overlay. Check out the rest of her thoughts here.
Motoring Down The Trails…with Two Horse Tack
There is no end to the color combinations customers can choose with our overlay and base color options. We’ve always thought Griffin’s choice to do the light blue overlay on a teal base was one of the most dimensional we’ve seen.
Griffin has a complete set of Two Horse Tack for her endurance mount, Prophecy, including halter bridle, breastcollar, reins, and crupper.
See what Griffin thought of her complete Two Horse set at her Motoring Down The Trails blog.
Buckle nose halters work great with grazing muzzles!
Our buckle nose halters are great to ensure a perfect fit on your horse (or donkey) for maximum comfort during turnout. We also learned, through the Pony Express blog, that they can easily take on a grazing muzzle, should spring or summer pastures become too rich.
“When Jacke contacted me I had just decided to try something for donkey weight loss, which is his very own greenguard grazing muzzle. I needed a second halter for him but wasn’t sure where to go since he’s a weird size. Two Horse Tack was the perfect solution as I was able to give them his custom measurements.”
Read more at the Pony Express blogÂ
Get your own buckle nose halter here.
Two Horse Tack Blog 