✅ SOLVED Horse Shoe Help

[cornspike]

Got a bunch of broken shoe's today, one shoe has some numbers on it, does anyone know why? Can anyone tell what years these shoe's are from? Thanks for looking

 

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[TheCannonballGuy]

Because horseshoes have "been around" for well-over 1,000 years, and their shape/form has evolved only a little, the "plain" ones cannot be accurately dated. All I can tell you about your group is that the version which has a recessed channel for the nail-heads was first manufactured a decade or two after the end of of the civil war.

 

[skeeterd]

The ones with letters are modern machine made shoes called keg shoes. The three zeros are the size. Triple ought. Very small, just a little bigger than a pony shoe. The DC is the manufaturer.
The shoes with the heels turned down are forged by hand. Still impossible to date. The heels were usually turned down on heavier draft horses used for pulling to give them better traction.

 

[Bramblefind]

The ones with letters are modern machine made shoes called keg shoes. The three zeros are the size. Triple ought. Very small, just a little bigger than a pony shoe. The DC is the manufaturer.
The shoes with the heels turned down are forged by hand. Still impossible to date. The heels were usually turned down on heavier draft horses used for pulling to give them better traction.

This helps as I was just going to post that maybe DC000 was the horseshoe size but I was just guessing based on finding this info on the Diamond Classic shoe-

They list a size "DC000"

Diamond

DiamondDiamond Tool and Horseshoe Company was founded by Otto Swanstrom in 1908 and was known as the Diamond Calk Horseshoe Company. Otto, who was working as a blacksmith in the lumber camps, realized that the time-consuming tasks of shoe removal and sharpening of the calk could be improved. At that point Otto invented the removable calk. The company began with two employees manufacturing the patented calk for horseshoes. In 1912 Otto build his first plant and began to manufacture horseshoes. Over the years the Diamond product line expanded to include a full line of farrier tools as well as many other hand tools and hand tool products. (See ANVIL Magazine interview with Cooper Tool's Herb Buecher, August 1994.)

 

[BosnMate]

You have a row of horse shoes that have been worn in two. As already stated, they were drop forged by Diamond Horseshoe Company, and were called "cold shoes." Meaning they were never intended to be heated for shaping to fit the horses foot, the heels were shorter and smooth, while hot shoes had to have the heels heated red hot and cut off to size and smoothed, while the diamond shoes were just banged around on the anvil cold to get as close a fit as possible, then nailed on and the foot rasped off to fit, which really isn't the best way, but is done a lot. The shoe is supposed to be shaped to the foot, not the other way around. That said, starting in 1959 I nailed on a lot of them. Diamond shoes are still in use today, they come for horses and mules, front and hind feet, plain or with caulks and toe grabs, and they come in full sizes, with size ought, one's and two's the most common used. The triple ought would definitely be a small pony shoe. The piece on the far right is hard to see in the picture, but it might be a hot shoe. Right now I can't remember the name of the company that manufactured hot shoes, but around the same time that I started using Diamond shoes, the Japanese started importing cold shoes in half sizes with trimmed heels. The Japanese shoes looked a whole lot like a hot shoe. A Diamond shoe and a hot shoe look nothing alike. The hot shoe is cut and has sharply defined edges and a deep crease for the nails, while the Diamond is drop forged and the edges are rounded and the crease shallow. The advantage of the Japanese shoes were they came in half sizes, so tended to fit better, and were less expensive, but they were made from scrap iron and had hard and soft spots in them, so no two shoes seemed to bend the same if hit in the same place, and were a pain to shape, while Diamond was uniform, and I felt easier to work with. Not long after the Japanese shoes were being imported, the hot shoe company went out of business, and I don't think it's possible to buy a new manufactured hot shoe now. The heels on the hot shoe were left long so if caulks were needed the shoe could be heated and the caulks turned.

 

[cornspike]

Thanks for all the info, this helps out a lot!