Brad Snyder pulls a blazing hot bar of steel from his forge. He rests the bar on his anvil and raises his hammer.
With a microphone strapped to his ear, Snyder tells the audience that he’s about to smash down an inch of steel into the “toe” of the horseshoe.
It was during a demonstration on Thursday that Snyder, the on-site farrier at the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair, showed an audience how he turns steel bars into horseshoes in roughly 12 minutes.
Equipped with an antique anvil, a portable propane forge that reaches temperatures as high as 2,200 C, a hammer and a toolbox on the back of a golf cart, Snyder forged multiple horseshoes for a live audience.
The demonstration was part of an educational program put on by the fair. But in an interview with the Sun, Snyder said his role at the fair is more than just education — his main job is to serve almost as a medic for the show horses, when accidents crop up.
“If they lose a shoe or get sore, it’s my responsibility to look after them,” Snyder said from the side of his anvil, waiting for a bar to heat up before his demonstration at the fair.
He continued to say that he even assumes the role of an emergency responder during the fair. For the Hackney competition, rules dictate that the farrier has seven minutes to fix a horseshoe that has been lost, he said. With his propane-powered portable forge and golf cart, he has that amount of time from the second he touches the horseshoe to heat, reshape and re-apply the horseshoe to keep the horse in action.
“Every shoe that I make is custom made for the horse,” said Snyder. He said when a shoe does come off a horse’s hoof, it is typically twisted out of shape and in need of custom adjustment.
Having been a farrier for 15 years, it’s his first time at the fair, his girlfriend, Jen Lewis, told the Sun. His work took him from Minnedosa last week to Oklahoma, as well as Virginia, with upcoming travels to North Dakota and Toronto.
For the audience at the Winter Fair on Thursday afternoon, Snyder said he entered the profession out of instinct — it felt like something he wanted to do, unlike university studies that he was taking at the time.
Hammering a red-hot piece of steel, he shared that the anvil was his great-grandfather’s, and it was built in 1896.
