claire_walker•1mo agoProlific Poster

Took me nearly 4 hours to pull a single stuck nail from a draft horse's hoof yesterday

Been doing this 12 years and that one nail fought me like it was welded in, finally had to drill it out bit by bit, anyone else ever have a shoeing job just snowball on them for no good reason?

3 comments

3 Comments

gonzalez.reese1mo ago

12 years in and you haven't dealt with a stubborn nail before? I mean drilling it out sounds like a lot of work, but is it really that big of a deal? Zero chance my clients would even notice the extra time.

alicesingh1mo ago

Grab a coffee first, @gonzalez.reese, because I just read this article about how some old nails actually fuse with the wood grain over decades, making them nearly impossible to pull without splitting the whole board. I've seen guys spend 20 minutes wrestling one that looked simple, only to snap the head off and make things a hundred times worse. Drilling it out sounds tedious, but at least you know the material around it stays clean and undamaged. Honestly, the time you waste prying and patching later is way more than a quick bore job.

patricia31719d ago

Gotta jump in here and say something about the wood grain thing. Alice, that article was about wood nails in construction, not horseshoes. Horse hooves are basically like your fingernails, they don't have wood grain or fuse with anything over time. The nail is just stuck in the hoof wall and the steel can corrode and get rough, making it bind up real bad. Drilling it out isn't about saving the material either, it's about not blowing out the hoof wall or making the horse sore from all the yanking. Gonzalez, it's not about clients noticing the time, it's about the horse standing there for four hours getting stiff and stressed for what should be a quick job.