Labeling Lines

[dominiquer60]

I am asking this question for a friend.

How do others label their beta lines? When multiple people are using lines for single through 8 and not everyone can put them back where they belong, or at least not right away, it is time to come up with a good way to label them. Tape and marker don’t seem to work because the tape wears away, and a silver sharpie marker look great until a couple times getting wet. How do others label or keep their lines organized?

Thanks for any replies.

[Big Horses]

We don’t use any Beta lines, all ours are leather, but I don’t see what difference that should make with this method… we punch a small hole or series of holes in the very ends of each of the lines. One in each line for a team/wheel, 2 for lead of 4 or swing of 6, etc… works great for us and we have them through 8 up. The 3 and 4 or more abreast are pretty obvious and usually nobody else is using them but us and that means they get put away right and promptly.
John

[dominiquer60]

Last year at the Big E we were watching a friend’s crew unharness his 6-up and we asked how he kept all of his harness straight. He uses colored zip ties, one color for each horse. So after a couple stops on the way home we found some colored zip ties and assigned each horse a color. Now all harness, collar, bridles and team lines are color coded, plus with the addition of scoring some neon zip ties we have all of our different length lines color coded too. All of the colors and corresponding animals and lines are written on the harness shed wall. Except when father uses a team (some old dogs don’t acknowledge new systems) this method works really well for us.

Below are a couple photos. The team lines with Yellow and Pink are for Dan (yellow) and Annie (pink). We use team lines with a ring shortly after the cross line connection, this way we can snap in a pair of but lines of the appropriate length. Generally we use short butt lines on a fore-cart, disk, sulky plow or cultivator. However we often need longer butt lines for other tasks, the orange is 24′ for single horse cultivator, cultimulcher or the Leroy walking plow, the blue is for the Oliver walking plow or single twitching and the neon yellow is for the leaders of a 4 up. Nice and neat and so much easier to keep order in the harness shed.

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