Merrilegs Rocking Horse

I built this rocking horse for my kids based off plans for the Merrilegs Rocking Horse from Woodcraft. I found out that I was having another kid, and I didn’t want to build another pedal plane just due to the logistics of storage and moving them across the country has been a pain. A rocking horse it is!
To be honest, I forget the thicknesses of the wood used exactly, but it was made with about $100 dollars in lumber from Home Depot, but it’s all made from pine and stained in natural and left over red mahogany from a bed that I was building (see other projects). For the most part, I followed the plans with the build. I omitted the harness, which I may attempt later. Instead of using a mop as the plans stated, my with assisted me with using cotton thread in making the mane and tail. The pine was particularly knotty, and while I like the look of knots, they were in some bad spots. Rather than buying a new sheet of pine, I just worked around the knots and filled them as best as I could. I also used an additional peg in each leg to add strength, which was probably an overkill. I used a hand crosscut saw to make the angle to get the legs to splay. That was probably the most difficult cut to get correct and required a lot of additional sanding. I ended up needing to make a 5th leg because I made a mistake in one of those hand cut splays. All the pieces were rounded over using my Ryobi router table.
For the handles, I used oversize Shaker coat pegs (I believe they were 5” long) after I drilled the dowel handles crocked. I filled them and used these reenforced Shaker pegs instead. The eyes are Shaker pegs (smaller than the handles that I cut off and glued into place, which gave it a nice eyeball effect. They are stained Red Mahogany as well. Everything else was pretty straight forward off of the plans.
This was the first project that I didn’t need to buy any more hand tools to complete! The cost was relatively low because of it! It was not a particularly hard build either. I think the hardest part was sanding the mouth area. That cut was made with a hand crosscut saw. The finish was a sanding sealer base followed by Red Mahognay and Natural, with about 5 coats of Poly on top of it all. The last picture also shows a stick horse, I’ll cover that in another project as well.