Friday, October 24, 2008

Who's sorry now?

O.K. So I can *finally* talk about it without twitching or mumbling under my breath! I went and picked the horse up. . .and it was a mess. Worse than I imagined. I took the following photos before I cleaned all the dirt and fly poo off. Apparently a couple of weeks spent living on the street is pretty hard even for a fiberglass colt. He was dirty, to say the least . . .but, oh dear. . .the damage. *sigh* :^(

The first and second pics show just a few of the MANY hairline cracks he was covered with. These thin cracks are all over the place in the other pics as well but not really obvious until you click on the photos to enlarge them. The really depressing part about these cracks is that they're on the *opposite* side from where the impact occurred. The top surface of the fiberglass figure is made of a thin layer of resin material. A good hard bump in one spot can shatter a much larger area.

The third photo is of the crack that runs up between the front legs. There are several fractures that go down the inside of the leg on the left about 6 or 7 inches.

The next two pics show the break that almost completely circled the left foreleg of the colt. Again, this is the opposite side from where the impact occurred but, because the colts feet were bolted to a small rolling wooden platform, the shock of the fall came very close to shearing this leg off entirely. There is only about 2 inches of material on the inside portion holding the entire leg on.

So far, you've seen the not so good and the really bad. . . but now prepare yourselves for the truly ugly.
The photos really do speak for themselves. On the largest crack, one edge has been literally shoved under the the other edge! If you enlarge the first shoulder photo here, you can see the crack extends a good way down the leg toward the knee.

The front photo of the chest (when enlarged) shows the extensive hairline cracks across the area, reaching almost to the other side. Needless to say, I was pretty "broken up" about all this. . .har har. (pun intended) There was SO much work to be done. . . I began to wish someone had just stolen it. . . or maybe it could go flying out of the back of the pickup while I was doing 65 on the highway? Seriously, I wanted it to disappear.
Naturally I didn't really get going on him until the last minute. . . partially because my heart just wasn't in it any longer, but mostly because I had absolutely no idea where to start or even how to go about fixing him. My Dad had some ideas, but some of them sounded sort of scary and like they might cause more damage than they would repair. I heard mention of prying something up, and banging it with a hammer. (?) By the time the new deadline was approaching (Oct 4th for the live auction) I was out of excuses and agreed to let Dad help me however he could.