Handmade Therapeutic Horseshoes

Heartbar shoes are a special type of therapeutic shoe used to treat lameness, hoof related injuries and conformational deficiencies.

Handmade horseshoes are largely impractical given the wide selection of machine made options available on the market. However, practicality aside, barshoes are fantastic practice for development and retention of almost all the basic blacksmithing techniques.

Isolation, upsetting, bending, square corners, drawing, forge welding, hemming, fullering (which is nearly identical to cutting/splitting), punching and measuring are all essential skills for barshoes and translate directly to ornamental blacksmithing, or even blade smithing.

While farriery and hoof care in general are not what I want to focus this channel on, I thought there would be some interest in watching the process making these advanced shoes from bar stock.

I'm still running low on coke for the coal forge, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to squeeze in a project in the gas forge.

Whether you're a new viewer, returning viewer, subscriber, or non-subscriber, I'd like to thank you all for watching! See you on the next one!