Making a Keepsake from Your Own Horse's Shoe
Turning one specific, sentimental object into something you can actually keep is a smaller job than most people expect, if you go about it in the right order.
Decide what you actually want before you start
The single biggest cause of a disappointing result is starting to cut or grind a shoe before deciding what the finished object is meant to be. A doorway hanger, a pendant and a set of cufflinks all start from the same shoe but need completely different amounts of material removed at completely different stages.
It is worth deciding this before any cleaning happens too, since a piece destined to be cut down small does not need the same careful preservation of the whole shape that a doorway hanger does.
Cleaning without losing what makes it specific
A wire brush on a low-speed drill or by hand removes surface rust and loose dirt without touching the shoe's actual shape, which matters because the wear pattern and nail holes are exactly what make this shoe different from a shop-bought blank.
Resist the urge to sand or polish it back to bare bright metal at this stage. A shoe polished too aggressively starts to look like generic hardware rather than something that did an actual job on an actual foot.
When to do it yourself and when to hand it to someone else
Cleaning and mounting a whole shoe as a hanger is well within reach of an evening with basic tools. Cutting a shoe down into a pendant or ring-sized piece, and finishing the cut edges so nothing is sharp, generally needs a bench grinder, proper eye protection and enough experience to know how the steel will behave under the tool.
If the plan involves engraving a name or a date, that is almost always worth sending to someone with the right stamps or a laser engraver rather than attempting it freehand, since a mistake on a one-off sentimental piece cannot be undone the way it can on a shop-bought blank.
Making peace with an imperfect result
A shoe that has done real work will never come out looking as clean and symmetrical as something made purely to be decorative, and that is largely the point of keeping it in the first place. The slight unevenness, the specific nail holes, the particular wear on one branch more than the other, are the parts that make it recognisably that horse's shoe.
For anyone who decides partway through that they would rather have something more polished and ready-made instead, or a second piece to go alongside the one they've kept, a shop-made pendant sits perfectly well next to a hand-kept one - nobody needs to choose only one.