Horeshoes Continued

A while back I showed how I made the segments for form the should horseshoes.

The next step in making the horseshoes was to glue these up. Once again I build a jig to help with this process. The jig is composed of a piece of plywood with three 2x2’s screwed to it which forms an area that is exactly the size of the horseshoes. This allowed me to stack the four layers and be sure they were perfectly aligned.

I placed the first layer, and then applied a coating of wood glue to the back of the second layer, stacking it in the jig. I repeated this process with the other two layers. Once this was done I screwed a piece of scrap plywood to the plywood which acted as a clamp.

The next step was to cut the pockets into the surface of the horseshow that will hold the shoulder details. This is the process I used to cut them, but I was not entirely happy with the results I got from this. It required a lot more hand working of the cut outs to get them to look good.

I made these cuts using a router with a straight cutting bit and a guide collar. I made  template out of luan plywood that would guide the router. I didn’t want to screw the template directly to the horse shoe so I screwed some blocks down to my workbench in various positions to firmly hold the part and then screwed the template to one of these blocks. Since this was a deep cut I made multiple passes to make the cut.

It’s been a while since I made these so I can’t remember exactly how I did the square holes. Since there is a small hole in the bottom of each one I may have started the hole using a forstner drill bit and the finished it with the router and template. I did make a template to cut both of the square holes with one template.

Once the router cuts were complete I used a chisel to clean up the corners and did a lot of sanding and patching to clean up the holes.