Hot Seating

No. I was sharing his wisdom because I don't have any beliefs when it comes to farriery.

My hypothosis is that if you apply a sealant immediately after hot fitting you would see a higher uptake than without hot fitting.
Hot fitting drives moisture out of the immediate area of contact, so the osmotic tendency(as Bloomer pointed out) immediately following that I suspect would be greater uptake of moisture?

Easier and more accurate to use an electronic wood moisture probe. Then do the experiment in vivo.

Would a moisture probe show if the tubules were sealed at the foot surface?

I've met him in person. At the time he was wearing a tie-died shirt. OTOH, it could have been somebody impersonating Bill Adams . . .

The in vivo experiment directly followed Christos's idea for an in vivo experiment.

You could easily follow the same basic protocol in vitro, use a small bone currette and sample locations to gauge uptake.

I don't know that anything short of putting a sample under a microscope could actually confirm that the tubules are "sealed." But this raises the question, how big are the openings in the tubules? Do you think that if you took a section of hoof wall and attached a hose to it that you could get water to flow through the tubules?

Some moisture meters work on electrical resistance with pins inserted into the wood and others work on ultrasound. You would probably have to calibrate the meter to get a baseline for horn, but all you would know is if the moisture level changed, not if the moisture came up the tubules or across the cellular membranes.

Took a A pic of a horse that hot fitting dose help. Fracture of p3 . Good level burn nice fitting of the clips

Well I do exist, and see that a couple of posts here came dangerously close to taking my name in vain.
I have for years told people that hot fitting seals the tubules, therefor it dose.
My scientific reasoning here is that when you put a piece of metal at about one or two thousand degrees F, on the bottom of the hoof, it's gona seal and melt any horny tissue and kill any microbes in the vicinity.
I look at this benefit as being just a little better for the horse and the quality of the job. This "little bit better" added to several other "little bit betters" soon add up to a lot better.

So, some first remarks from todays first experiment with samples and pictures. The microscope does not show any tubules the way I expected them, ie no empty tubules. No little holes on the surface. The tubules are there, but they are more like little monofilament fibers than like little tubes. They are not empty, they do not have a hole through their center. Have to get better samples to take a picture of this, the shavings I obtained were too thick to lay flat under the lens and still too thin to split in two. I'll take better ones tomorrow.

But we have some close up photos with a camera. These are the walls of very healthy hooves, nice and strong. They were barefoot through the winter. It seems that the surface is packed to a thin glassy layer. No tubules seen there, everything is smooth and shiny. Only surface cracks on this otherwise glassy surface. But once you take a very thin shaving off the surface, the tubules become visible. You can see in these pictures too that the tubules are not little tubes. There are no holes.

Now that Bill Adams is here this forum is a little bit better.

Welcome to the farriers forum Bill!

Christos, that is awesome.

Thanks! Looking forward to more. Also, how about drying out some hoof trimmings and see what happens?

We'll work it out, Tom, slowly but surely. It was a surprise not to find any little holes close to the surface, not even at 400X magnification, but I have to verify this tomorrow, it can be that rasping the area or shaving it with the knife, however gently, crushed and sealed the tubules. I'll try to obtain samples with a very sharp little wood plane, it will also give a much smoother surface to take photos.

It does seem initially that our assumption of the tubules being hollow at the distal end of the wall is not valid. They are hollow at their origin, at the coronet, where the little hair that generate them occupy the little hole in their center, but they may be growing down solid from there. We'll see.

We can relax now,Bill is here.

How do we know this is the real Bill Adams ?

Question? How would the movement of the hoof, expansion and contraction, affect this . Would it help move fluid up and down the tubuals?

I was wondering the same thing , could they be swelled shut?