Luke taught me a little about welding over the weekend constructing a horse shoe art project. Since he welds professionally he did all of the front welds and I tried my hand at connecting the shoes from the back side. The idea came from a few images I encountered on Pinterest. I fell in love with the idea of having a horse shaped coat rack. So Luke was kind enough to help me out with this side project.

Since Luke is also a trained farrier he has lots of used horse shoes sitting around, some were even left overs from my personal horse Johnny. We went to work trying to shape the shoes just right to make the head of the horse. Luke brought out his portable forge and went to town heating up the shoes to bend them just right.

We went back and forth quite a bit before settling on the perfect formation of shoes for the head. Luke is somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to welding projects which was okay with me. I like how the head turned out.

Once we had the right configuration we marked the shoes so we would know where they went and then took a grinder to them to clean them up a bit before welding. Once they were clean we welded them together one by one. Then we flipped it over and I welded the back for additional support. Here is the welded head with an eye and nostril added for aesthetics.

Next came the back bone and rump where we will place hooks for hanging coats and things. The photos I used for inspiration used a rebar for the spine but we have so many shoes laying around it made sense to just use more shoes.

We added some large horse shoe nails to create  hooks off of the body. Once it is all said and done I wrapped some old baling twine I found on the barn rafters to create the mane and tail. All in all I am very proud of my talented boyfriend! I think this will be a gorgeous addition to my cabin.