Last year, Victory sponsored the first annual Summit Mail-In Forging Competition in which the shoe was a hammer-finished, jump-welded heart bar.

Victory is sponsoring another free mail-in competition in which everyone receives a free T-shirt and the top finisher will walk away with a buckle and free registration to the 2017 International Hoof-Care Summit.

We’re upping the game this year with some creativity and have a shoe that I have never seen or heard of. As farriers, we have to be great at all sorts of creative and artistic tasks, and making something that can do the job while we are on site is just part of the trade. As such, I wondered what an aluminum shoe with a steel bar made out of a rasp would be like.

I decided to make the shoe out of 1/2-inch by 1-inch aluminum so that I could have ample thickness to rivet the bar in place. In the end, I made four shoes to get to my desired finished shoe for this contest, and I still want to make others to improve it. However, a deadline is a deadline, and we need to present this shoe so you’ll have time to make one before the February International Hoof-Care Summit.

I think you’ll find yourself in the same position in the months leading up to the Summit. The shoe itself is quite simple, but making the bar out of the rasp and getting it in place challenged me and required research and development.