Restoring a Draft Pair Harness

 

Restoring old draft harnesses isn't sexy, yet there is a reassurance about the job.  This particular set of harness is older than most.  At 41 years -- built in 1985 --  it is arguably the first spotted show draft pair harness I ever sold to a customer.  It is the oldest harness I've ever tried to restore (to date).  Rebuilding attempts in the 80s might pre-date it, but those were for myself.

No he's not a shrinky, just angled different

 I took on the job last year [2025], but it's only been since late May that I've been able to get going on it.  The plan was fairly simple:  Clean, polish and replace the buckles with gold-filled wire.  Easy, right??  That was before I realized that the leather, dried out for decades in Colorado air, had done something I've rarely seen,... and never been able to fix.  Despite heroic efforts by others to save the tack with oiling and greasing, the straps had no strength and would break at a touch.  Everything but the patent was cracking and falling apart.  The thing was cursed.  I made up a term for it:  Dehydration disintegration.  There was nothing for it but complete replacement.

Harness restos can be boring because you can't really see the difference between old and new;  but let's try.  Here is the old pole strap/breast strap arrangment:  note the dullness of the brass.  Also note the large-ish split rings on the ends of the hames;  that loewr hame strap has its own keeper, but trust me that keeper isn't inset or sewn into the collar in any way.  For this collar, that was a poor design choice.  The hames didn't like to stay in their groove.

Here are the hardware parts of the old pole/breast arrangement.  If anyone is wondering whether they should use brass wire in model tack, let this be the answer.

Whenever bare brass touches leather, its copper interacts with the tannins, creating verdigris.  The verdigris, mildly poisonous, is thick on the tongue buckles.  Below:  one bright ring stands out:  it's been polished.  The strap at upper right is a new one;  it connects the collar top (at the withers, not the peak) to the backpad hook, and its ring and buckle are gold-filled.  See what I mean:  Even close up, there's not much visual difference in a photograph between the old brass and the bright gold!  But in person, yes, it is noticeable.

I polished and polished.  I kept the keepers;  heaven help us, they seemed strong and there's very little strain on keepers.  Some of the old lace could pass my 'pull test.'  But, once started, I wanted to be consistent in replacing strappage.  My shop's lace has been kept in airtight dark.  No oiling or greasing was done on the replacement straps;  their very newness should keep the harness safe for another 40 years, provided, I think, that the set is kept in a reasonable climate and not sunned too much.  (On this point I offer up my own model harness collection, approaching 50 years and kept unsealed in normal indoor air but not direct sun, oiled maybe once with Lexol and rarely cleaned.  None of my tack has done this disintegration trick.)
 

Here's one of the old martingales.  The brasses (here, the crescent) were precious, imported from England (Lenham Pottery) at the time, as were the hames.  The brasses were so expensive each harness has only five.  They are gold-plated pot metal, and due to that gold they had nothing to fear from those 41 years.   Gold is the answer, either by plating or filling*, if you want tack to last for a really long time.  For full scale it is damningly expensive but at model scales it can be afforded.

*plating = 0.05% gold by weight, cheaper than filling = 5% gold by weight

 What's particularly charming about handling this ancient harness is seeing the design.  I was just starting out back then;  I didn't have the hardware options we have now, but I knew the function of the parts.  I was trying to get the pole strap/breast strap arrangement to show a harness brass on the chest (pretty ornamentation) and yet still be able to stop a loaded wagon via the breeching, which lines up with it (harness is lines of force).  I didn't know I could make a roller buckle for the breast strap.  I opted for a dee ring, sleeved with an aluminum ferrule or roller, handmade of course.  The snaphook fastens directly onto that dee.

 Thus you have the pole strap, whose lines of force run directly from the end of the wagon pole in front of the horse (imagine it snapped to the hook), between the front legs via the martingale (drooping here), through the belly ring, splitting to the 2 sidestraps and fastening to the breeching, which wraps around the hindquarters.  The breast strap, running from side to side, helps hold up the pole strap and adds some 'holding-back' power from the collar and traces.  Between and beneath, the beautiful chest brass shines out, neatly out of the way.  The top strap of the martingale wraps around the collar throat, and its buckle isn't even sewn in.  There is an elegant simplicity here.

Curiously this harness's chest brasses were mounted on flat leather chafes,... unlike the patent leather which backed every other brass.  You may be sure I replaced them with patent!  Did I run out? or was just sloppy??  I'll never know.  It's equally a mystery to me why the patent leather would not be so affected by the dehydration disintegration.

Earlier I mentioned the lower hame strap.  Here we see the old (right) and the new (left).  I've made the rings in the hames as small as I could (and from stainless steel) and inset 2 keepers so the hames can't possible escape.  There is barely room for them, but they are critical.

 And here are the upper hame straps.  The old harness didn't know how to inset, or sew into the groove, its hame strap keepers.  It thought merely using keepers on the hame straps would do the job.  But patent is slippery.  The newly restored collars feature keepers sewn into the groove,.. a real trick, using awls and chisels to get the lace stuffed in the cracks and then triangular needles to stitch them down, along the seam lines.  It may look similar, but believe me, once you've fastened everything up those hames are not gonna slip around any more.

These collars are very old,... from the start of my career.  They are probably unique, an evolutionary step on the way to today's methods.  Here's a glimpse of how I was solving the problem of making collar peaks in miniature.  

There is a lot going on there, not least using patent for the bottom face, something we don't do nowadays.  The large collar-top buckle in the above shot is turned back;  normally it is angled the other way and the wide (3/8") lace passes through it, forming the collar top.  The double wire, looking straight, is the bottom of the bell wire, coming out of the peak and going forward to form the hook.

Most amazing of all, all the spots were made from straight pins.  That's not something I would ever do again!  I'm leaving those little bits of metal alone.  If they're not fiddled with they'll lie pretty much in place.  Egad, the power of 25-year-old tackmakers.

Left new, right old

Next up:  girths and backpads...