Saddle for use with multiple horses

[BAC]

@touchstone-

This may be an unpopular opinion, but if you want your own saddle and want to ride multiple horses, you should probably just get a fairly average shaped saddle with foam panels and live with the fact it won’t fit everything perfectly. This is what a lot of professional riders do. Most horses will be fine, and a few will be either so weird or so sensitive that your saddle won’t work. The owners of such horses usually know who they are and insist on always using their custom saddle anyway.

Too wide is easier to fix with padding than too narrow, so I’d look for something on the wider side of average. I’d also look into a shimmable half pad.

This may not solve the problem of these two particular horses with such different conformation. But I agree with @ParadoxFarm’s suggestion that you can probably find a saddle that works for at least one of them and will also work well enough for a lot of other horses, too.

This makes sense to me, in fact its just what I did. And buying a saddle is not a lifetime commitment, OP can always sell it down the road if it doesn’t work out and she finds something that works better for her needs. Or have more than one saddle if she’s riding lots of different horses. My trainer had a Butet and a Devoucoux, between the two of them something usually fit but most often she ended up riding in the horse’s own saddle if they had a custom fitted one.

[fordtraktor]

I have a Tad Coffin TC2 with SmartRide tree, and while it doesn’t fit everything perfectly, I have been able to make it work for all my horses (with the help of various half pads). And they all love it. I bought mine used, so it wasn’t that expensive. I used to have 4 jump saddles, but eventually I sold everything but the TC2 so in the long run it was a money saver.

[cardinale]

Just a point about the Bates Easy-Change gullets: they take a fair amount of work to switch–not something you would want to do routinely, e.g. in between riding two differently-shaped horses the same day.

[dani0303]

I have noticed that a lot of the French saddles on MW trees without a lot of custom paneling will fit most h/j type horses fairly well will minor modifications. My Devoucoux fits my WB like a glove and requires minimal shimming on the other horses I ride (QH, TB, other WBs) to be acceptable.