VCMBH: Bit It Up

For this weeks blog hop, as I continue to struggle to find the right bitting situation for the Dinosaur Jr. I want to hear all about what bit you ride your current beastie in and why!

So we have three.

Our current dressage bit is a Myler loose ring comfort snaffle, MB 02 mouthpiece.  Basically this, although the description states copper inlay and I'm not sure mine has that.  I have a strong preference for loose ring bits where possible; I rode Tuck in a baucher for a while and think the stability helped him learn to go to the contact, but I ideally like a little more "play" than I feel like a fixed side piece allows.  I can't remember why I decided to go shopping for a Myler in particular, but this was the dressage-legal mouthpiece at the time, so it's what we -- oh, right!  I had borrowed a bridle for a lesson when I'd taken mine home to clean it and forgotten to put it back in the car, and he went great in that's bridle's bit, which happened to be this one.  Et voila!

I occasionally swap it out for some other loose ring -- he did a year of fantastic flatwork in a fat single-joint no-name bit, frex -- but always end up coming back to this one.

Our long-time jump bit is this Korsteel Beval loose-ring, which I remember being outrageously popular in the eventing jump phases around here at the time we started using it but seems to have been supplanted by elevators and the various with-hooks designs at this point?  I've been happy with this, though, so no need to fix what ain't broken.  We went to it because even a well-schooled Tucker sometimes feels he knows better than I do and isn't always right about that.  This rides a lot like a snaffle, so it's user-friendly for me and doesn't back him off the bit, but there's just a touch more there there in a "whoa, damnit!" moment.

And I've talked recently about our new trail bit, but just to recap: Myler two-ring combination bit with the same mouthpiece as our dressage bit.  I also demoed a small port to see if he'd prefer a little more tongue space, but he did not.  Basically I wanted something with a little more potential oomph than our dressage bit -- which he hacks beautifully in the vast majority of the time, but I just did not want to find myself, for example, in a bad moment on a public road with an inadequate-for-that-moment tool -- and liked the idea of dispersing the action a bit more around his face and was willing to give up some subtlety, given this bit's specific role in our lives, in exchange.  So far I am pleased.