I have a new team of Percherons (17 HH) and my father has a team of Halflingers that we use on the farm. Switching poles around all of the time is getting monotonous so I have been looking for an adjustable length pole setup so we can easily swap teams on equipment, but have not had much luck. Has anyone developed such a thing, or have any ideas/recommendations on how to build one?

Thanks, David

I have made some telescoping tongues out of steel tubing. It works okay. I also use heel chain extensions for the smaller team and leave the tongue alone.

The one I have around here is 2" pipe with 1 1/2" sliding in it. It is on a auto steer wagon so it has ever gotten bent. Why not just bore a new hole to move the evener?

David,

It might be easier to just adjust the length of the tugs on the harness of the Halflingers to fit the longer tongue. There are several on here who work a variety of sizes of animals on the same equipment.

Todd

Why not use trace chain extensions on the Halfingers harness and you won't have to change anything on the pole.

As mentioned above, I have used trace chain extensions for my Haflingers on draft tongues and it works, though it can be a bit awkward depending on the vehicle. My preferred solution combines two issues. I have gone to bolt on neck yokes on most of my equipment for safety reasons, so it is simple and easy to bore a "short" hole for the haflingers and move the neck yoke back and forth when changing horse sizes.

I cannot recommend using the same length pole for big draft horses and Haflingers by just lengthening the latter ones' traces. That changes the force required to move the load. It may make only little difference on blacktop with an empty wagon, but if you plan to move anything in the field the uplift you need to get the load rolling you only have when the horses are closer to the load.
If one doesn't mind that the pole extends further in front of the Haflingers (and there might be situations you don't want that) then it seems to me that Buckeye has a practical suggestion.

Klaus is right, we use trace extension chain on all of our Haflinger trace chains and longer ones on the 450 lbs ponies. that way we an hook them all to all of our forecarts and equipment.

Gentlemen, Thanks for all of the responses. We had thought about the trace extensions but my dad had concerns with his team being farther away from the load as well as the extra pole weight on their necks.

Dale, moving the evener might work on some of the items but other equipment (plow, mower) have the evener bolted onto the machine.

I will try to look at some type of telescoping arrangement out of tubing.

Do you think if I made stub receiver out of metal tubing that bolts onto the equipment and then made wooden poles that could be slid into the stub receiver and secured with a hitch pin/cotter pin would work? Or is there some other concern that I am missing?

Thanks again, David

This is what I did on my fore cart to go from 2 to 3.

Billy

The ponies will be further away from the load with the longer tongue but no further from the tongue than the big horses.

As for the tongue weight, you have it backwards. The longer tongue actually gets lighter on most implements. A mower for example the longer tongue is like having a longer lever on a pry bar. The shorter tongue will put more weight and side draft.

I have had really good luck with heel chain extensions. We have used the same wagons for 11 hand ponies and 17.2 hand shires with the addition of heel chains.

In pulling competitions you will have noticed that the teamsters try to make the traces as short as possible so that when the horses start moving there is an uplift to the load which makes it easier to move. The same logic applies to wagons. While the weight of the longer tongue because of the longer lever of course will be lighter at the tip, the horses can exert more power onto the load when hitched shorter. That's why in plowing, for example, one has to have the horses just hitched right, too short and you get too much uplift for the plow, too long and it gets harder to move it through the soil.

Klaus, ever notice how when the load gets real heavy, a good horse squats down to pull? So you hook shorter to keep the pull square to the hame so it don't hurt them. They will only pull until it hurts.
On a plow, your pull needs to go in a straight line from the hame to the center of draft of the bottom or you need wheels to bend the force so the plow don't dive down. Most ag equiptment use wheels to bend the force so it will work.

You are right, Dale, about the angle between the trace and the hames. It should always be 90 degrees. But that angle changes with the length of the traces as the point of height of the evener behind them doesn't change on a wagon, when you put shorter horses, in this case ponies or Haflingers in front of the wagon with extended traces. My concern is solely with the horses comfort, not with the style or the looks.

By the way, I had the same concerns when Pioneer changed the shaft attachment to their forecart and put the evener on a higher level between the shafts. I noticed that the angle between the traces and the hames changed because of the higher placement of the evener. The taller the horse the smaller the change, but on the Haflinger it changed more. At a given height of the horse the further away you put it from the load the flatter the angle. I liked the older construction of the single horse forecart with the evener at the same height almost as the platform better for that reason than the newer form (of which I have two).

You can tighen up the belly band and change the angle by bending the trace. One logger I knew had a special belly band made so he could pull logs off a bank without breaking the normal ones..

Dale, how would you avoid putting pressure on the back respectively the belly when you bend the traces ? I always thought bending the traces should be a no-no.

In this area, we use the open back/market tug style mostly which has no backpad. A slight bend won't break the tugs, just wear them faster. Why worry about pressure on the back? A lot of wheelers had a man ridng on them and it didn't hurt them. The new england style transfers pressure to the back and those tugs bend freely at the ring in the middle of them. You can adjust them to where the pull comes square to the hame no matter what the height of the pull.