Adventures in harness work

Our mare Flower appears to be a well trained harness horse from her life prior to living with us.Our four year old gelding was started as a yearling or 2 year old before we got him. We tried him last year and he was not comfortable with the wagon. This year with a lighter, two wheeled training cart he is much more comfortable and a willing drive. Flower on the other hand, loves the wagon and the training carts.

She showed us the correct placement of the harness straps and she is a willing test pilot for each of her human's creations. Flower is shown pulling his latest design a high seat, bike fork cart. 
Each cart is tested by her first as she can deal with any problem that may arise if a piece fails. For the first mile of testing she is accompanied by a human acting as a groom or headman, whose job is to steady her and remove her from a broken test cart should it be badly damaged. 

This design above is the same piece as the previous but it needed to have the shafts trimmed down. She lets us know when things are not as they should be, she was huffing and snorting quietly to her groom to tell him that they were too long. 
After Flower tested this cart we hitched Tanka as he asked to try. He did fabulous! Of course I have no pictures as I was on call for assistance, since he was naughty last year. He wanted to try again a couple days later, but sadly we bent a wheel when Flower was giving me a tour.