Original article by Hardy Zantke
Published on DrivingBits with the kind permission of the author.
I promised the list of equipment that we need for this part.
Besides two pair harnesses and your pair carriage, you’ll need the following additional equipment. Only the first two items are absolutely necessary. You can get started even without having any of the other items, as you can jury-rig them to begin with.
A set of lead bars for your carriage and a way to attach them to the front of your pole.
Make sure your carriage is built strongly enough to support the extra weight of the lead bars as well as the extra groom on the back.
There are different types of lead bars in use. The common one is a main bar with two swingletrees. I suggest you start with that rather than with a single wide lead bar.
A good welder can usually build you a set fairly easily, or you can use a wooden set, but make sure that it is strong. You never want a lead bar to break because it is not strong enough. The pieces could hit the leaders in the hocks, and even if they are not prone to kicking, that can certainly send them running.
Four-in-hand leader reins.
Your pair reins should be sufficient as wheeler reins, unless the coupling-rein buckles are very close to your hands.
As with the lead bars, make sure that you have strong leader reins. You depend on this equipment, so don’t use old, questionable equipment that has seen better days.
Proper equipment is important to prevent accidents. You wouldn’t start parachute jumping with a marginal parachute either.
My advice would be to get leather reins. I love my Zilco harness, but I cannot drive properly with synthetic reins. They are too narrow and slip too easily through the hand.
We cannot have any rein slippage when driving four, as the team then gets out of alignment.
Leader and wheeler reins should be of the same material and the same width. Otherwise, you will find it difficult to drive properly with all four reins in your left hand.
Two Roger rings, which you should already have from your tandem driving.
Traditional pleasure drivers often still use the rein terrets on the wheeler bridle rosette. They have the disadvantage that, in turns, they pull the inside blinder off the inside wheeler’s head.
Therefore, competition four-in-hand drivers prefer Roger rings, which are buckled into the throatlatch buckle from behind. At first this looks backwards to the layman, but it makes sense because under tension it will not pull the throatlatch buckle open.
But if you don’t have Roger rings yet, that should not stop you. You can simply use two large key rings and tie them with a piece of baling twine to the outside throatlatch buckle of each wheeler.
A leader-rein terret in the centre of each wheeler’s saddle.
If you don’t have these, you can certainly start without them by simply running the leader reins through the outside saddle terrets as well.
But having the centre terrets makes things much easier because you can distinguish more easily between the leader and wheeler reins coming to your hands from slightly different angles, with the leader reins coming from the centre of the saddles.
Leader traces or trace extenders.
Leader traces are usually a little longer than regular pair — or wheeler — traces.
If you have buckle-in traces on the leaders’ pair harness, they may be long enough if you simply buckle them into the last hole. Otherwise, to get started, just use four pieces of rope at the ends to extend the leader traces.
A connecting strap between the collars or breastcollars of the leaders.
Note that no connecting strap is used there for a proper Pleasure Driving or Coaching turnout, but CDE drivers use a connecting strap, and you will want one too when you start out to help keep your leaders together.
An old stirrup leather or a similar strap will do, or you can even use a rope to begin with.
A whip long enough to reach your leaders
— if you think you will actually be able to use one to reach them.
Otherwise, simply use your pair whip for the wheelers and your voice for the leaders.
Some of us have also had our groom carry a handful of pebbles and throw one at a leader as a whip replacement — but then the groom needs to be good at it.
The last piece of equipment is frowned upon by traditionalists and therefore hardly ever mentioned in any of the books, but I recommend it to every beginner: a rein clamp.
This is a clamp with which you can secure all four reins together once you have them in the right position and at the proper length for your trot work.
When you drive using the two-handed system, you should have two rein clamps, one for each hand.
But as I explained in the previous article, you should really start with the Achenbach system for all your training as well as dressage. You should only use the two-handed method for driving marathons and cones.
There, that system is faster — and your well-trained horses won’t fall apart if you lose contact for a split second while taking a loop, provided that they were normally trained using the Achenbach system.
The disadvantage of the rein clamp is that once you set it in a given position and have clamped all your reins together, you cannot easily adjust them in your hand other than by taking loops or moving your hand.
For larger adjustments, you would need to change the setting by opening the clamp, adjusting the reins to a different position and then closing the clamp again. That is much harder than adjusting the rein length in your hand when you don’t have a clamp.
But the big advantage of the clamp for any beginner is that you can concentrate much better on driving your horses instead of having to clamp your hand tightly all the time to make sure none of your reins slips a little through your fingers.
Clenching your hand to prevent slippage will quickly make your hand tired and take all the fun out of driving four.
Furthermore, I explained in Part 1 why you want leaders who are really forward so they are always on the bit and giving you good control. That usually means they will pull a little in your hand.
Without the rein clamp, that forward contact — together with simply the weight of four reins — will make your left hand tired very quickly, especially when you are not yet used to it and haven’t built up the muscles for it.
Then, without even noticing it, you will try to relieve that pressure a little by giving with your hand.
But that won’t relieve the pressure for long. It will only make you lose contact with your wheelers, and in addition it usually results in your leaders getting into draft, which then makes them pull even harder.
That forces you to clamp your hand even harder to prevent any of the leader reins from slipping through your fingers.
Everything becomes more difficult and much less pleasant for your poor hand — and takes all the fun out of driving your four.
All of that can be avoided by using a good rein clamp.
You clamp the reins together behind your fingers. No rein can slip through anymore, you can hold the four reins easily, they cannot get mixed up, and they stay in place with the left leader above your index finger, the right leader below the index finger, the left wheeler below the right leader and the right wheeler below the middle finger.
Your hand can hold them easily with the rein clamp. You don’t get cramps, your arm stays soft, and you can enjoy driving your four and concentrate on the driving rather than on clenching your hand.
For the rein clamp, you also want good leather reins close to an inch wide — or 7/8 inch — but not narrower than that. Narrower reins can lose their position in the rein clamp.
Even when driving without a rein clamp, narrower reins are harder to hold and slip more easily through the hand and fingers.
Without the rein clamp, you’ll soon switch to driving two-handed, where the reins don’t slip so easily, and you’ll become a sloppy driver with a sloppy team.
So get a good rein clamp — or two for when you get ready to drive your first marathon or cones and want to switch to two-handed driving.
There are various types on the market. I like the small, lightweight stainless-steel clamps that look like an open square through which the reins pass, with a small vice-like bracket pushed upwards by a set screw from the bottom.
The entire clamp is hardly noticeable from the outside because it sits in the left hand, and it makes driving four so much easier.
That is all the equipment that you need to get started.
I already mentioned in Part 1 that you should get the book *The Principles of Driving* by the German National Equestrian Federation for the proper rein-handling techniques.
It also covers many other aspects of driving — not only four-in-hand driving but driving in general — so it is a good investment.
In addition, I recommend *A Driving Horse Photo Album* by Robert Mischka. It shows many of our top drivers and is very useful for studying the photographs in detail: how they hitch, for example, which Roger rings they use, how long the pole heads are, where the lead bars are positioned so that the wheelers don’t hit their noses on them, and so on.
In the next part, I’ll give some tips on actually driving your four.
Original article by Hardy Zantke.
Published on DrivingBits with the kind permission of the author.