Fixing Stirrup Treads

By Patty Wilber

I put a foot in a stirrup multiple times on most days, and I confess I never even noticed there was leather wrapped around my stirrups until one piece wore out and fell off!

A stirrup with a rawhide wrap and my naked stirrup.

My worn-out piece. Bottom side up.

I rode for one day with one stirrup treaded and one untreaded, and decided I needed to fix that issue, so I looked online to figure out what that piece was even called! Stirrup treads.  Turns out there are stirrup tread replacement kits and DYI videos, too.

Then my friend Peter pointed out that he had a bunch of leather, and tools.  He offered to help me with the project.

First, we measured the stirrup width and circumference.  But we failed to add some extra on the circumference to account for the bend. We cut a slightly bigger piece.

(And good thing we did this ourselves because the kit leather, all cut and pre-punched, would have been too big, and I would have ended up doing it myself anyway.)

Peter edged the piece and rounded the corners so it’d look nicer and not tend to catch on things. (I caught on two branches today and now have two holes in a pair of riding tights, so catching on stuff is not an idle issue with me…)

Edging the new tread.

We measured the distance from the edge to place the holes and I punched holes.

Punching holes.

Then Peter soaked the leather so it would be soft and easily wrap around the stirrup.  I studied the intact stirrup and then laced the first one on.

Lacing the new tread on!

Then we started on the second one but had to undo and re-lace because we skipped a hole.

Soon we had two newly-treaded stirrups!

I let the lacing flip over on the last hole of the stirrup on the left. Should have fixed that, but oh well. The lacing ends are just stuffed back under. They aren’t secured to anything.

That was a pretty simple but very satisfying project!  We fixed a saddle part I had never even named!

Happy Friday!