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More Thoughts On Hoof Nippers
Taking a mill file and cleaning out the dirt and funk at the boss helps if they aren't closing nicely helps. I wrap my handles in sports tape to take the chill out of them in the winter and give a better grip with gloves on.
In the summer it can get a bit ratty so I usually take it off but my hanhs have gotten used to the feel of the tape so I usually rewrap them right away. This keeps the handles nice and shiney though when I take the tape off.
— Vern Powell, Marengo, Ill.
If you are a new person to the industry, ask a lot of full-
time farriers about nippers. What is the best for them? Which one is the top of the professional line? What is a good back up? Ask for three different ones and maybe one that if it gets destroyed — no big lost.
With any farrier, new or experienced, quality can encompass many things, one is how they feel in your hand. Farriers are very sensitive feeling. They can feel how a horse moves, they feel how a hammer, driving or rounding hammer works. So feel with a nipper is important along with weight. If a tool is to heavy or too light, it will not work. If the balance is not right, the tool will not work for you. I always like to use numbers in one of my clinics, example would be that if you work 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year had a good account of 250 horse on a six week schedule, you would average opening and closing a pair of nippers approximately 117,000 times and that is with no pressure being applied. Now you can see that feel, balance and weight are important.
Besides light oil and cleaning the stops of debris, if you have a bucket say for doing trims, keeping the rasp in an old piece of fire hose will keep the rasp from banging around on your other tools especially your nippers. Keep the handles from getting all nicked up. Keeping rust off the blades, rust is bad if you let it get started in a big way.
If a farrier is correctly using nippers and is conscience about them, you will see the edges rounded off and no nicks, chips, etc., out of the blade. The reason the edges get rounded off is most farriers will walk their nipper around a hoof and with the edge leading the way, with normal wear the edges will be rounded.
The main sign of misuse is chips out of the blades from rocks and nails. Human nature tells someone when they hit a nail to pull back or push forward. We do it subconscious. You need to train yourself to either go around the object or "as in a nail" cut straight through it. Best is to not cut through the nail at all, use so other means to get the nail out. But we do not live in a perfect world.
Sharpening nippers blades is an art. There are angles on the inside on top of the nipper. Too steep an angle, stronger the blade, harder to cut through a hoof, swallower the angle, the sharper the blade, yet more fragile. Nippers are made to lift and cut not slice through.
— Dan Bradley, Lucedale, Miss.
When I buy a new set, I will take them to the belt sander and deburring wheel.
What I do is round off the inside corners off of the whole length of the reins. That makes it so they are alot easier on my hands, especially when nipping back the flares. They don't dig into my hands near as much.
That was certainly not my invention — Dan Bradley told me about that a few years ago and it works very well at saving my hands when the feet are dry and hard.
— Mark Thorkildson, Anoka, Minn.
