tack cleaning experiment...

I had heard on some horse forum, (cant even remember the name of it) that Castile soap was THE thing to clean tack, and had a huge following even though it was an "ol timer's secret". I must admit I'd never heard of it.

So curiousity got the better of me, I had several items that I'd tried everything else on and could not get the dirt off of them, and I'm talking severe 'dirt' from an episode of the cattle breaking into the tack room and wreaking havoc on everything in there while they had a slumber party. Needless to say, I've been trying the last few years to get the manure out of these items without scouring and scratching the leather itself, and it just never budged. Well that saga is behind me now I'm happy to report, and since I had to order online, I got 5 bars of Kirks and 2 of Dr Bronners Rose scented. (It doesnt have a rose scent, more a faint flowery one). Of the 2 brands, Kirks worked better with lots more suds action and very little effort at scrubbing, I used a yellow tack sponge as usual. I wish I had thought to take a before pic of this saddle, while it was still a dark color, it was dry from needing a cleaning anyway, and the manure was cemented down into the tooling and the seat. The directions I used were to just use enough water to make suds and circular motion to clean till all dirt was gone. Then to take a clean sponge and alot of clean water to rinse (I filled a gallon jug and just poured clean water to the sponge, and left it to dry. The next step was to condition as this type of cleaning can dry the leather out so I had a new product I wanted to try as well, Feibling's Aussie conditioner.
 My first impression of this stuff was it was rather a strong odor, and it is thick like Vaseline. But I wanted to see how it would do given it's sposed to waterproof and hold up in extreme temperatures, so here we go. This is 5 days after I used the Aussie conditioner, and buffed it yesterday. It is still super shiny! If you look closely, you can see the bottle's reflection even.

Compared with this saddle which only had Fiebings saddle soap (yellow) used on it. Clean but not near as rich looking. Yet. I plan to try another brand of conditioner on this one and see how it looks...